SPIRITUAL LAW 
NATURAL FACT 




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J.C.ARMSTRON 




Class "13 \ ?~ % 
Book__ 



Copyright N°. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Spiritual Law 
In Natural Fact 



BY 

J. C. ARMSTRONG, D. D, 



PHILADELPHIA 

THE GRIFFITH & ROWLAND PRESS 
1913 



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Copyright 1913 by 
A. J. ROWLAND, Secretary 

Published March, 1913 



©CI.A346072 
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CONTENTS 

Chaptbr Page 

Introduction 4 

I. His Words and his Works 9 

II. Light 23 

III. Accountability 37 

IV. Prayer and Miracles 49 

V. Sin and its Remedy 62 

VI. The Seen and the Unseen yy 

VII. There Is One God and but One 90 

VIII. The Vine and its Branches 104 

IX. Life after Death 119 



INTRODUCTION 



This book is an effort to collect facts and theories 
more or less familiar to everybody, and to put them 
into a particular combination for confirmation or 
illustration, especially of spiritual truth. In this 
sense the field is somewhat new to the author. He 
finds peculiar delight in discovering new and wider 
likenesses between things spiritual and things mate- 
rial, and he is confirmed in the view that it is 
quite as correct to speak of spiritual law in the 
natural world as to speak of " Natural Law in the 
Spiritual World." Maybe we are yet to learn that 
the laboratory is, after all, as sacred as the altar, 
and that spiritual forces are as definite in their 
combinations and actions as those other forces 
which we have arbitrarily put on the other side of 
an imaginary line and labeled as simply physical. 

To help any devout heart to this conception, and 
to win the favorable attention of any who may be 
skeptical toward God's written thoughts, is the chief 
reason for writing this book. Nothing like scien- 
tific order or theological sequence has been at- 
tempted in the arrangement of topics, and certainly 
no claim is set up for either extensive or intensive 
cultivation of the field which is opened. We come 
4 



INTRODUCTION 5 

upon our topics much as we meet the facts of nature 
in daily life, and much as we find various forms of 
religious truths mixed together in the Scriptures. 
Our readers are invited to take their Bibles with 
them and walk through the valleys and groves and 
fields. We look at the flowers, the fruits, the 
leaves, and the rocks. There we see footprints and 
finger-marks which we know are those of our 
Father, for we have become acquainted with them 
in his book. It is more than a fancy with us that 
Jesus was walking this very path we are in, when he 
gave those wonderful parables. Here are the vines 
which taught the lesson of a soul's fruitfulness 
when it abides in him. Here are the flowers God 
paints and the sparrows he feeds, just as he clothes 
the soul of a saint or tenderly cares for his children. 
We handle the flowers he made out of mud, and we 
see how heaven came down in sunshine and put 
celestial colors into them. We eat of the fruit 
which he compounds in mysterious laboratories to 
nourish the life he has created and loves. Wheat 
and tares grow together, out of the same soil and 
under the same sunlight; nor do we fail to note 
that though they are so near each other and so much 
alike, he remembers all the time which is the wheat, 
and he is not mocked at harvest-time. 

Then we go to a sick-room and see one of his 
unordained ministers, but none the less his minister, 
giving remedies he has made to cure the ills of the 
flesh. We only have to remember that he is the 



6 INTRODUCTION 

Great Physician. In a ward of the hospital we see a 
skilful surgeon, who has studied the delicate bodily 
structure which has been built after the divine plan, 
as he presses the knife along the path God has 
marked out with infinite precision. Because that 
path has been followed in the making, it can and 
must be followed in the mending. We stand breath- 
less, because this man is a sort of high priest min- 
istering in the most holy place. It is a service of 
sacrifice and suffering for one form of salvation. 
We go into a laboratory, and the devout man who 
is at home there assures us that he has not created 
nor decided anything ; he is merely finding out how 
God has done and still does his work. We go into 
a factory and find men who have called in God's 
forces of steam and electricity — forces which they 
cannot see nor understand — to do their bidding and 
minister to human progress. These material 
machines are efficient just in proportion as they are 
orthodox. 

In all these studies we are impressed with two or 
three very significant facts: In the first place, all 
these operators produce nothing of matter or force, 
but simply accept what is provided for them. Every- 
thing which they take hold of is a revelation from 
without themselves, is inspired. In the next place, 
there are definite rules which they must follow to 
secure the good which they seek and which seems 
to have been made for their beneficent use. In 
other words, they work under unfailing and in- 



INTRODUCTION 7 

violable authority. The light which guides them to 
useful action is not light from within, but light 
from without. Investigation and reason have their 
office in comprehending the will of the Lord, but it 
is his light and his law that governs and guides. 
Last of all, it is plain that he who made nature made 
it for the welfare and the delight of his creatures. 
Wisdom and love are written large. True, one 
could ignorantly or wilfully violate the rules, but he 
does so to his own hurt. There is perfect freedom, 
but unquestioned responsibility. 

As to the amount of significance to be given to the 
comparisons which are made in these studies, there 
will be difference of opinion. To some there may 
seem to be almost absolute identity between the facts 
of nature and the facts of grace, where others will 
see only a likeness more or less distinct. The writer 
does not undertake to weigh the evidential value 
of each case. He has tried to use discretion all 
along, and leaves to each reader the privilege of 
suggesting values. He has refrained from straining 
facts or twisting theories to make them fit any 
view he may hold as to nature or grace. He has no 
sympathy with reckless spiritualizing processes. On 
the other hand, he is profoundly convinced that 
the plans of God are as nearly the same throughout 
all creation as the conditions allow, and that where 
the laws of revelation and those of science border 
upon each other or meet in a common field, they 
are in close partnership. God does not change the 



8 INTRODUCTION 

pattern as the weaving proceeds. It may not always 
be possible for us to trace the pattern all the way 
from the body of a fabric out into the delicate 
fringes, but in no case is the original abandoned. 
This is a material world which we see all about us, 
but it is our Father's house made for his spiritual 
children. The same great provisions run across 
the line we seem to have to draw between the mate- 
rial and the spiritual, and the promises written in 
the book find the conditions for their realization 
in this physical life and this physical world. So 
when our brief excursion for study ends, we come 
back to God's house and thank him that in wisdom 
he has made this world as our home during part 
of our immortal life. 

J. C. A. 



SPIRITUAL LAW 
IN NATURAL FACT 



HIS WORDS AND HIS WORKS 

"Anything God makes is worth looking at." 
So wrote a man who loved both nature and revela- 
tion and who delighted to find them in harmony 
with each other. The hand which wrote the Bible 
also made this material world. Between them there 
can be no contradictions. When we are able to 
understand the Scriptures fully and when we have 
mastered the problems of nature, we will find them 
in perfect agreement wherever they occupy a com- 
mon field. An intolerable and impossible situation 
would be for a race of intelligent, moral, spiritual 
creatures, created for a final home in heaven, to be 
compelled to live in a material world made by an 
entirely different creator, fashioned on a wholly 
different plan, and governed on some other basis. 
There would be confusion, contradiction, and defeat 
at every step of the effort to live for the highest 
ends. We would have perpetual and irremediable 
chaos, rendering futile any attempt to be happy in 
the present or in the future. No man can serve 

9 



10 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

two masters; no life can occupy a place in two 
hostile realms at one and the same time. 

Jesus was at home in his earthly mission. Despite 
the fact that human hearts refused him homage, he 
was at home with nature. He knew the meaning of 
the flowers and the fields. When homes were closed 
against him he went up into the mountains. Winds 
and waves listened to his commands; water turned 
to wine at his bidding; a tree withered under his 
cursing; blind eyes opened to look upon him; ears 
that heard no human voice awoke to his whisper; 
diseases fled at his reproof; and even the dead 
turned back to life at his call. The only hostility 
he met was the unbelief of human hearts. He 
walked and ruled the earth as part of his Father's 
wide domain, and not as a territory foreign to re- 
ligion and heaven. And what is still more to our 
point, he found heaven mirrored in these earthly 
forms. Nature was a reflection or an expression of 
the same qualities in God that appeal to us in the 
Scriptures. Recondite and unknown spiritual truth 
was found mapped out in the plants and their 
growth, in animal instincts and material forces 
which are open to the eyes of all. This is what 
distinguishes the manner of his teachings from that 
of all other teachers. Nature was his picture-lesson, 
his text-book, his demonstration. He found in this 
primer the principles of knowledge which are more 
fully set forth in the advanced text-book of re- 
demption. 



HIS WORDS AND HIS WORKS II 

No doubt if the Master were here now he would 
seize upon all modern inventions and discoveries, 
and throw their illumination upon the pages of 
sacred writing and far along down the path that 
leads heavenward, to make easier the progress of 
his disciples. He did not despise or discredit nature. 
He never let drop a hint that any one of his dis- 
ciples would ever be justified in treating lightly the 
fashion or meaning of this material world in which 
God's highest creation finds its temporary home. 
God made the mount before he gave the Sermon 
on the Mount. It is an honor and an advantage to 
live in these later days, because there is possibility of 
knowing so much more of God than was known in 
the past. The universe is filled with the proofs of 
his wisdom and power. It is criminal to reject him 
in the face of all this proof, and it is well-nigh as 
criminal to shut one's eyes against the tokens of his 
constant presence in the physical world. The scien- 
tist needs to hear the word of God ; the theologian 
needs to look upon the works of God. 

&t every turn the Master came, without any seem- 
ing surprise, upon some illustration of what he 
wanted to say about religious truth. The thirteenth 
chapter of Matthew is a picture gallery, on whose 
walls hang seven likenesses of the kingdom of 
heaven. Most of the pictures are from nature. He 
made nature, he drew the picture, then he made 
the comparison. The leaven, the vineyard, the 
grain-field, the flowers, the birds, the winds, the 



12 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

flood, the darkness, the light — all of these were ob- 
ject-lessons in his kindergarten teachings to impart 
spiritual truth. We are authorized to read the 
glory of God as declared in the heavens and his 
handiwork as portrayed in the firmament. Is it not 
disloyal to refuse to learn these lessons he teaches? 

A pioneer came from the crowded East to make 
a home for himself and family in the new West. 
The country was open to him. After careful search 
he found an eligible place, where elevation, water 
supply, accessibility, and fertility gave promise of 
a good home. He set about building the house, 
thinking of every member of the family as he laid 
out the rooms and provided for each. Love is not 
brick, tenderness is not mortar, anticipation of hap- 
piness is not like boards, but all these sacred 
elements helped to fashion that dwelling. When 
the family came, they were dull beyond excuse if 
they failed to see the evidence of his regard for 
them. This earth is not the final home of saints. 
A better house on higher ground will be built 
for them at length, but this is what our Father has 
done for us till the days of our training are over. 

It ought to be to us a matter of special gratitude 
that nature has these innumerable lessons about 
God, and especially that its lessons are so thoroughly 
in accord with those which revelation teaches. Our 
first acquaintance is with the physical world; there 
is first that which is natural, and afterward that 
which is spiritual. The simpler lesson prepares us 



HIS WORDS AND HIS WORKS 1 3 

for that which is more difficult. As in secular 
studies, the alphabet remains with us to the last 
page of the profoundest book, and most of the 
simple words of childhood are familiar to the end. 
Early in life nature breaks in upon us and our 
primary conceptions are fashioned from its forms. 
Our language is created to express what our senses 
take in of the material, and we continue through 
life in the midst of nature's marvelous works. The 
first door of our earthly house to open is the door 
which opens out into the physical world; later and 
more slowly that other door, which admits us to 
the spiritual world, swings back and we discover 
that while we are akin to the brutes our highest kin- 
ship is with God and angels. Acquaintance with the 
material ought not to lead us away from the spir- 
itual. Learning the multiplication table does not 
make it impossible or more difficult to master the 
higher problems of mathematics. We learn to count 
with blocks, but that helps us to count the stars 
and trace the rhythm of their mathematical motions. 
There is one course of study, though different text- 
books. There are separate revelations of the 
Father's mind, but it is the same Father. Most of 
this earthly life is, as we might expect, closely asso- 
ciated with the material, but nature is a friend to 
grace to help us understand God. 

An unlettered man, who cultivated a few lean 
acres for the support of himself and family, was 
greatly surprised when told that his little bit of 



14 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

farm was marked off and described in terms and 
lines borrowed from the heavens. The surveyor 
establishes corners and lays down borders for these 
farms and lots according to heaven's landmarks 
and heaven's directions. Our latitude and longi- 
tude are celestial terms. When we have need of 
fixed weights and measures we have recourse to the 
law of gravitation which runs throughout the entire 
universe, and we weigh our pound of food in the 
same scales God uses to weigh a sun and to hitch 
it to its place in the systems. Earthly facts are 
so thoroughly dependent on those of the wider 
world that we go at once to the original for our 
standards. This is true whether we are on sea or 
on land. A pilot pays small heed to the waves which 
surge against his vessel, or to the winds which fill 
his sails. They are shifting and uncertain. Instead, 
he looks millions of miles away and asks sun or star 
to tell him where he is and whither his course is 
taking him. His chart is of the heavens rather 
than of the waves. He travels on a great circle 
and keeps watch on the skies as he seeks an 
earthly port. The stars are his banner by night 
and the sun his light by day. He waits for heaven's 
signals when to take up his ark and when to turn 
this way or that. Here, as elsewhere, increasing in- 
formation convinces us of the unity of the universe 
under one wise and harmonious control. The lower 
and the higher are parts of a wide-stretching king- 
dom, which is harmonious from center to circum- 



HIS WORDS AND HIS WORKS 1 5 

ference because made and controlled by one Mind, 
which is wise and which has all power. 

In meditating upon the ways of God in the 
realm of grace, I have been startled by stumbling 
upon some fact or force or process of nature 
which closely resembled doctrines and experiences 
of grace. The passing wind which keeps sweet 
the breath of man or which, stirred to wrath, des- 
troys all in its path, made me think that the love 
of God and his wrath may be but the different mani- 
festations of the same force. It was only a physi- 
cian's remedy for disease, but it was strangely like 
the incoming of sacrificial merit to cleanse a soul 
from the malady of sin. It was only the annual 
task of planting seed and growing a crop on the 
hillside of the old farm, but the plowboy became 
a laborer with God, and his humble calling became 
wondrously like the work of the preacher who plants 
seeds of the kingdom in unpromising soil, but re- 
joices to see it watered from heaven and made 
fruitful. Sometimes in these experiences I have 
wondered whether I had not wandered across the 
border-line between what we call material and what 
we call spiritual, and without noticing the difference 
had strolled into the suburbs of the heavenly. The 
question invariably came up, whether, after all, we 
had not erred in our blindness in making too sharp 
a distinction between what is religious and what is 
secular. Perhaps the scientist has been looking at 
the texture of the cloth while the theologian has 



1 6 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

been talking about its color. This one has analyzed 
the chemistry of the loaf while the other has 
been occupied with its taste. One has studied the 
mechanism of the wire while the other has been 
reading the message it was carrying. There is a lot 
of splendid theology in the multiplication table. The 
binomial theorem is an unanswerable proof-text. 

A word of caution here is not out of place. 
Matter is not the same as spirit ; nature is not iden- 
tical with grace; there is a difference between the 
things seen and the things unseen; what is true 
of the body is not always, perhaps never exactly, 
true of the soul; the flesh is not the spirit. We 
cannot throw away the Bible and find the way to 
heaven by following a star or a river. There is no 
path in the forests or in the fields that certainly 
leads to everlasting life. There is no gushing spring 
to furnish the water of eternal life. Our fathers 
ate manna in the wilderness, but if that is all the 
food they had they are dead. There is no skill that 
can build the holy city out of our common bricks 
and cement. There is not gold enough in the 
Klondike to pave one block in the new Jerusalem. 
Natural religion has no system of salvation from 
moral evil, though indirectly it lends its cures and 
its penalties to the enforcement of ethical laws. It 
has no message of a father who waits at the gate 
with the word of pardon on his lips. 

There is but one God, and he rules by law. Pos- 
sibly we can see hints in nature of his benevolence 



HIS WORDS AND HIS WORKS 1J 

and of his fatherly care. But only in his book does 
he take us apart from nature, of which we are a 
part, and there open to us the confidences of for- 
giveness and peace. We must not go to the scien- 
tist and demand of him that he demonstrate to us 
all that we have learned of God through Jesus 
Christ. The most we can ask of the scientist is 
that he tell us whether nature puts a final and ef- 
fective veto on the operations of grace; whether 
there are in nature any hints or likenesses or illus- 
trations of those doctrines which are found in the 
Bible. Maybe he who made medicinal remedies for 
the physician to use in healing disease can himself 
go a little farther and bring Lazarus back from the 
dead. Feeding a multitude by the seaside is not, 
after all, so very different from carrying a basket 
of food to a starving family in your block. These 
are not the same as ministering specifically to sick 
and starving souls, and we must not confound 
them ; the physical is not the spiritual, the temporal 
is not the eternal ; but the two worlds are bordering 
lands, and we must deny neither the one nor the 
other. 

I have been the more hopeful of finding a useful 
place for this volume because a feeling has gone 
out that the spiritual is not real, or that it is not 
worth while. It is not beyond truth to say this 
is emphatically a material age. It is a time of rich 
food, of fine houses, of costly clothing, of easy 
riding, of tremendous business enterprises, of 

B 



l8 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

money-making, of colossal fortunes, of fashionable 
display of riches, of sight-seeing, and of wide travel. 
The eye, the palate, and the spirit of pride are in 
command. We have quit the closer and careful 
thinking our fathers did, and all we care to take the 
pains for is to see. It is easier to see than to 
think. It is a day of pictures and picture shows 
and illustrated papers and kindergarten methods for 
old as well as young. Even the preacher must re- 
sort largely to illustration and description in order 
to have a patient hearing. Add to this change of 
taste among us the further fact that marvelous 
progress in scientific discovery and invention has 
obscured for a time the value of spiritual matters. 
It may have gone so far that the ordinary student 
can go from the primary class to a diploma of the 
university, engaged every day with worldly studies 
and material forces, without having so much as 
heard from teacher or text-book that there is a 
spiritual realm. The secular has become danger- 
ously secularized. Our current courses of education 
do not so much oppose religion as they ignore it. 
If there is allowed to be another sphere of life, it is 
treated as a something entirely removed from time 
and place and matter and nature and this present 
life. 

These younger people need to be told that they 
are right now in their Father's land ; they are study- 
ing every day the laws he has instituted, they are 
handling the products of his hand. The knowledge 



HIS WORDS AND HIS WORKS . 19 

they seek with commendable avidity is nothing more 
nor less than standing by and learning how God 
accomplishes the work of his hands. He walks be- 
fore them in the path; he is beside them as they 
study his works; they are forced to think his 
thoughts after him ; in every invention he lays down 
the lines to be observed ; in chemistry, in astronomy, 
in biology, the study consists absolutely in follow- 
ing a text-book which God wrote as really as he 
wrote the law on tables of stone in the mountain. 
All that the scientist or inventor knows is in the 
book before it is learned, and the authority is with- 
out question. To call some student back from for- 
getfulness of it all ; to induce him to stand in silence 
a moment and hear the whisperings of heaven; to 
have him look down and see the footprints of the 
Maker — this is what I should like to accomplish by 
this message. 

There is another condition which seems to me to 
make this line of thought especially appropriate. A 
school of idealists has sprung up, and though the 
classes of this school are widely apart in some of 
their theories, they are agreed in denying the reality 
of this physical world. Some of them, on philo- 
sophical grounds, insist that we cannot know any- 
thing about an exterior world, nothing beyond the 
sensations we experience. Nature has little or no 
appeal to them. Another class, on what may be 
called religious grounds, denies the reality of matter, 
rejects the testimony of the senses, and reduces the 



20 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

universe to some sort of impersonal deity. Along- 
side of these idealists there is the school of mate- 
rialists. With them there is nothing but matter; 
theirs is merely a world of dirt. They deny the 
existence of spirit, the reality of any vital dis- 
tinction between right and wrong, and, of course, 
their doctrine has no place for immortality of the 
soul. 

Such theories are as empty of fact as they are 
destitute of hope. One denies the physical, the other 
deifies it. Between these unreasonable extremes, 
and over against them both, stands the right under- 
standing of Scripture and the right interpretation 
of nature. Every step in scientific discovery is a 
further confirmation of our faith in the unity of 
the universe. That nature is intelligible is proof 
that it is the product of intelligence. The parables 
of Jesus proceed on the claim that all truth is 
sacred, whether it be truth found in nature or in 
revelation ; and the further claim is implied that all 
truths are in harmony with each other, no matter 
from which sphere they are learned. This is the 
only rational view of nature or of grace. Ultimately 
unity rests in an intelligent, powerful, and beneficent 
Creator, whom the Bible teaches us to trust as our 
Father. 

I have thus called attention to the constant and 
familiar and apt use which Jesus made of nature and 
of inventions based upon natural law. In this he 
warrants us in thinking of the material world about 



HIS WORDS AND HIS WORKS 21 

us as part of God's kingdom. It is filled with God's 
thoughts; it displays the divine power; it illustrates 
heaven's methods. It occurs to me that there is 
need to add a word as to the part assigned nature in 
other Scriptures, especially the Old Testament. 
Now and then I have come upon remarks by certain 
modern thinkers to the effect that biblical writers 
represented God as dwelling afar off from earthly 
affairs, working arbitrarily and unnaturally when- 
ever he chose to accomplish definite purposes. They 
use the word " transcendent," by which they mean 
that the Scriptures introduce him now and then into 
this lower sphere only to work a miracle or in- 
augurate new movements. The modern representa- 
tive insists upon the immanence, or permanent dwell- 
ing of God in the world of nature, accomplishing his 
purposes through fixed laws and in usual manner. 
It is readily granted that the older writers did 
not talk of immanence or secondary causes or uni- 
form laws, but they did dwell most eloquently on the 
majesty of God in the control of natural forces. 
The Scriptures are full of the thought that nature 
is but the product of his hand, and every occur- 
rence comes under his control. Take as a single 
example Psalm 104. Light is his garment; the 
heavens are a curtain he stretches; the bed of the 
ocean is the beams of his chamber; the winds are his 
pathway; clouds are his chariot; at his voice the 
earth melted and the seas fled ; he made the path of 
rain-clouds and raindrops ; these fountains he opened 



22 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

for the thirst of man and beast; he irrigates the 
mountains and creates harvests in the valleys; in 
his looms carpets of green are woven for the fields ; 
he planted the trees and his birds sing in their 
branches ; by the moon he marks of! the hours and 
by the sun he carves the day out of the eternal 
years; even young lions take food from his hand; 
to man the days are measured out, until he goes at 
length to his final home. And then in a splendid 
summary the exclamation is made : " O Lord, how 
manifold are thy works ! in wisdom hast thou made 
them all ; the earth is full of thy riches." 

Thanks to modern science for helping us trace 
more accurately the paths of his creating and con- 
trol; but it is not a recent discovery that God is 
present all the time managing affairs of this material 
world which he created and in which his glory 
shines. This earth is not a foreign country to him. 
All through the Old Testament there is a close link- 
ing of the material to the spiritual world, and in 
repeated cases physical rewards and punishments 
are made part of the moral government of heaven. 
How true and how graphic is this from Henry 
Drummond : " The visible is the ladder up to the 
invisible ; the temporal is but the scaffolding of the 
eternal. And when the last immaterial souls have 
climbed through this material to God, the scaffolding 
shall be taken down, and the earth dissolved with 
fervent heat — not because it is base, but because its 
work is done." 



II 

LIGHT 

Light is recognized as one of the most wonderful 
of all the natural forces. For a long time it was 
believed that every material, visible body sent out 
a constant stream of minute particles, and that these 
particles in some unexplained way reproduced the 
picture of an object in the eye. That theory, along 
with a great many scientific theories and as many 
theological doctrines, has reposed in a junk-pile for 
years. The chaff-pile beside the thresher is larger 
than the heap of clean grain. It is now universally 
accepted that light is a manner or mode of motion. 
It is not a something of itself, but is the move- 
ment of a peculiar form of matter. Eternal still- 
ness would be eternal silence and eternal darkness. 
It may be that all motion is a hymn of praise or the 
discord of a shriek, only our ears are too dull to 
hear more than a few notes in the endless scale of 
sounds. The universe is quivering with movements 
too small for us to apprehend, except as we catch 
a bit of the motion in terms we call " sounds," and 
these movements redeem the world from silence and 
from death. Light itself is invisible, as invisible 
as the spirit within us or as the presence of Jehovah 

23 



24 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

moving amid the affairs of his kingdom. Its busi- 
ness is to reveal. 

Going a step farther in their explanation, scien- 
tists assure us that light and heat are one and 
the same force. In essence there is no difference 
between them. If the waves of ether are of a cer- 
tain length and rapidity, they give us the sensation 
of heat, but if their amplitude is altered and their 
time-table changed, we have light. And in another 
step which they threaten or promise to take, they 
are about to tell us that electricity is going to take 
its place beside heat and light, and make a unity out 
of a trinity. 

Indeed, one of the marvelous achievements of 
modern science is the identification of several forces 
which were always considered as entirely distinct. 
In an earlier day the force which drove the wind 
was supposed to be under a special god, the light- 
ning was the property of another, and the fire of 
another, and so the earth and air and sea were so 
many different realms. Now these forces are found 
to be in close alliance. They are partners to com- 
mon ends, and in many cases they are discovered to 
be absolutely identical. There is no longer war 
between two gods, whose kingdoms border upon 
each other, but intimate partnership, if not actual 
identity. Science is made up chiefly of a discovery 
of the uniformity, orderliness, and unity of all 
material forces. Nor can any one predict how much 
further this unity will assert itself. Because ncvtvre 



LIGHT 25 

is understandable, it is the product of intelligence; 
and because it is harmonious, it was made and is 
ruled by one mind. Modern science has rendered 
polytheism impossible and atheism unreasonable. 

There is a startling passage of Scripture which 
says that " all things are naked and opened unto the 
eyes of him with whom we have to do." This decla- 
ration takes us at once beyond the material world 
and its ministry of light, uncovering some of the 
objects close about us. Instead, it carries these 
conceptions over into the moral world and affirms 
that at some period a spiritual sunlight will throw 
its floods upon all the conduct of all men and un- 
cover the entire scene to the gaze of men and angels. 
Darkness is the element for wickedness, but right- 
eousness belongs to the light. The only, but suf- 
ficient, reason why men love darkness rather than 
light is because their deeds are evil. Thieves and 
assassins and gamblers and cheats always hide their 
evil under cover of darkness. At least one-half 
of life's thoughts and plans are never made public. 
There is a foolish assumption that whatever is 
hidden from view will forever remain concealed. 
But science no longer allows darkness to dominate. 
It has learned for us that with perfected instruments 
to supplement our imperfect sight much that had 
been concealed by darkness is brought to light. The 
human eye is limited in its range. One cannot see 
through ordinary objects of appreciable thickness. 
But it has come to be known that a measure of light 



26 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

passes through material objects and carries an image 
that may be made visible. The scientist turns a ray 
of light upon a piece of leather, a block of wood, 
a sheet of iron, or on the human body and brings out 
a picture which the unaided eye could never catch. 
Fractures, dislocations, lesions, and foreign sub- 
stances are clearly revealed by the penetrating light 
and through instruments far more delicate than the 
eye. There is probably light enough now pene- 
trating every recess and corner to make the whole 
physical world, near and far, fully visible, if only 
our sight were more vigorous. 

Such revelations of science are frightfully sug- 
gestive. One thinks of the possibility that the soul 
is penetrable by the rays of moral light or is subject 
to exposure beyond our wildest hope or fear. The 
conception of the possibility, if not the certainty, 
of the uncovering of all sin, is not a scientific 
anomaly. Rays of moral light now shoot through 
the wide range of human conduct, motive and pur- 
pose and unspoken suggestion and secret deed, paint- 
ing the full transaction upon an indestructible back- 
ground to be gazed upon by the whole universe. 
The common form of our faith, that there are books 
in which records preserve in imperishable form the 
conduct of men, and by which we are to be judged 
at last, is but a feeble embodiment of what takes 
place in heaven's bookkeeping. By nature's present 
arrangement we can plainly observe the bodily move- 
ments of those who are about us, and can take note 



LIGHT 27 

of the slightest action. A blush, a sneer, a curl of 
the lip, a shaking of the head, all of these are open 
to us, and they often reveal more plainly than words 
what is going on in the mind. But there may come 
a time when powers of perception will be increased 
or when fuller light will be thrown upon moral 
movements, and we shall be able to read thoughts 
and see motives and translate purposes that are now 
hidden. The fires which picture the torment of the 
lost may be but the brilliancy of the light which 
uncovers to men and angels the secrets of a corrupt 
or unworthy life. 

Could you come to know that some one had been 
following you for days or years, using one of these 
machines for making moving pictures, and that in 
his film he had the story of your life and all the 
places you had frequented, the company you kept, 
the attitudes you assumed, you might not feel com- 
fortable about it. And then if he should announce 
that on a certain evening he is going to throw that 
entire scene upon the canvas, you would probably 
take the first train out of town or sue out an injunc- 
tion. Certainly if the scientific fact corresponds to 
matters spiritual, and all your inner life were threat- 
ened with similar exposure, there might be torment 
of soul that only lacked sufficient time to make 
it eternal punishment. This kindly, beneficent, life- 
nursing, heavenly light which gladdens an otherwise 
dark and dead world, has in it the potency of judg- 
ment and condemnation. The films of heaven's 



28 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

laboratory preserve unwasted and infallible the chap- 
ters and lines and letters of human history, and 
the judgment scene might be described in terms of 
the photographer. Not alone are the sins we commit 
to be exposed in this public exhibition, but the silent 
sufferings, the unmerited criticism, the unjust con- 
demnation, the patient endurance of injustices, the 
faithful performance of unrequited services, the un- 
written benefactions and the unrecorded struggles 
of tempted souls to be loyal to right are then to 
have their first and their full recognition. 

In civil and social government we are just be- 
ginning to recognize that publicity is necessary for 
the maintenance of good order. Courts and officers 
are using their shrewdest methods to uncover testi- 
mony. They are invading the corners which were 
supposed to be so strictly individual as to be in- 
violable, and are trying to compel men to do what 
is right. Commissions and investigating committees 
are invading the sanctity of counting-houses and 
bank records and stock-books and financial records 
of private firms, on the growing theory that it is to 
be through exposure that righteousness may be 
strengthened. It begins to look as if there is to be 
no private or hidden business in the future. The 
solidarity of the race, the close partnership of in- 
terest in all social and financial affairs, the insepa- 
rable interest of rich and poor are coming to be 
looked at in another way. The race is moving, 
as to science, as to government, as to property 



LIGHT 20, 

transactions, as to political conduct, and as to sin, 
right out into increasing light. An inevitable and 
universal result of that will be greater knowledge, 
larger view, more universal prosperity, a better ad- 
justment of rights, and a cleaner sort of living. 
When there are no dark spots in which men may 
hide their evil deeds, either wickedness will have to 
cease, or the entire race will go down in conscious 
tolerance of wickedness. 

At some period in the progress of the race, there 
was no articulate speech. Only by rude signs was it 
possible for one to know what another thought or 
felt. Two souls that lived close together in space 
were far apart in their ability to communicate with 
each other or to understand each other. With the 
facility of refined speech, we may exchange thought 
and carry on an intimate commerce between mind 
and mind. However, within limits, this communica- 
tion is purely voluntary. You need not tell your 
secret, and unless you speak it out your most in- 
timate friend is powerless to know it. Maybe we 
are to come to the period when we may read each 
other's thoughts, just as once we advanced to the 
stage where we could express what is within us. It 
will be a new day when, as you pass along the 
streets, you can see into the secrets of those you 
meet, just as now you can see inside the home whose 
windows are open and whose lights are burning 
brightly. It will be a new situation when you are 
rejoiced or frightened with the knowledge that 



30 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

those who are around you are acquainted with every 
secret wish and hope you cherish, exactly as in the 
past they have been aware of your bodily movements. 
Limits which are now set against our power of 
reading minds may be removed, and every brain 
become an open book and every wish a legible page. 

All our natural abilities are circumscribed. My 
arm reaches but a foot or two above my head, while 
all the expanse stretches out beyond my touch. At 
best I .gather only the few apples which ripen on 
the lowest branches. I can lift my voice to its 
highest pitch or swell it to its largest volume, but 
across the block or over this hill I am not heard. 
A flock of birds passes over my head, but they are 
safe from the range of my gun. I see distant hills 
and mountaintops, but it is not far out yonder to 
where smaller objects are indistinguishable. Even 
with the best telescope there are infinite stretches of 
space and infinite ranks of stars which are unseen. 
The microscope reveals structures too tiny for the 
naked eye to see, but it tells me of other descending 
ranks too small to be seen. 

The unknown grows upon us daily. As you gaze 
into the deep sky at night, it is no trouble to see the 
prominent stars. The eye hunts them out at once. 
But here and there are patches which appear blank. 
If seeds of worlds were planted in those areas, the 
harvest has failed and all is desert waste. Has 
light no story to tell of these places? The as- 
tronomer turns his camera's face to that spot. 



LIGHT 31 

After minutes of exposure he carries it into his dark 
room, his holy of holies, his audience-chamber with 
the Almighty, and with closet door closed, waits on 
the ministry of light. At length he comes to me with 
a photograph of a star which no human eye has ever 
seen, whose existence had never been detected, but 
which yields itself to the wooing of these rays of 
light. These vagrant, orphaned threads of light which 
have been thousands and hundreds of thousands of 
years bringing their message have arrived to bring 
greetings from the stranger world, and to claim 
enrolment in the congress of worlds! Along these 
penciled wires of light, or through this wireless ex- 
panse, are coming the greetings from God's out- 
posts, and when the final display comes to pass, the 
unseen and unknown stars shall stand out in eternal 
brightness — the children of light in a world from 
which darkness has forever fled. And when the 
scientist has shown me these wonderful proofs of 
the universal reign of light, and when he has proved 
to me that there is much beyond the range of my 
small understanding, then I begin to comprehend 
that we walk by faith as well as by sight. 

And when I see a troubled soul look away to what 
seems to me a blank spot in the heavens, breathing 
out wish or waiting for recognition, I dare not say 
the hope is vain. What right have I to put narrow 
limits to the possible or the real? And when the 
averted face of the inquirer turns back to me radiant 
with the brightness of a new hope and full of the 



32 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

image of the invisible God, I am thankful to the 
photographer who gave me this stepping-stone to 
my faith. Surely both of these worlds are within 
the benevolent jurisdiction of our God, and he is 
leading us gradually through the dimness of the 
present to the endless day, the undimmed light of 
that other land. 

It belongs to another chapter to speak of the con- 
stitution of the heavenly bodies, but the method of 
ascertaining the constituent elements of the stars 
belongs to the science of light. God sends the mes- 
sage in cipher. A fragile ray of light that may be 
quenched or diverted or corrupted by small inter- 
ference reaches the end of its long journey and falls 
upon the prism. What a disappointment it must 
feel for such a landing after such a heroic journey ! 
And when it falls upon the prism, it breaks and 
shatters into divorced fragments of straggling light. 
But in falling it tells secrets which no one else has 
ever told. It reveals that the planet from which it 
was despatched a thousand years ago, and from 
which it has come without obstruction at the rate 
which would carry it around our earth eight times 
a second, is composed of exactly the same material 
used in building our earth, and that therefore we 
are blood relatives. And this messenger assures 
us that there are other wide extended plains be- 
yond its home, and that if we are patient additional 
light will break upon us. There is more beyond. 

And then the microscope stands on the table 



LIGHT 33 

beside the telescope, and it brings its lessons from 
the ranks below us. Physically man is far above 
the average of bulk in the family of living forms. 
Looking down along the trembling path of light, 
he sees the forms growing more minute until his in- 
strument fails, and he waits to find the border in 
the realm of the small. As far as light penetrates, 
and the end of its ministry has not been found, 
it uncovers the wonderful works of God and prom- 
ises us that when our vision becomes more acute 
and is able to enter new scenes, there await us 
larger knowledge and fresh evidences of the un- 
bounded universe of our Father. Our degrees of 
space may not emerge into infinity, and our meas- 
ures of time may not multiply into the eternal; we 
cannot know just how they are adjusted to each 
other; but these enlarging views may well enhance 
our appreciation of God and qualify us to be citizens 
of that country which faith tries to picture. As for 
our little earth, the sun rises and reveals more and 
more of the affairs earthly, and so the Sun of 
righteousness shines with increasing light to make 
plain the ways of God to men and the path which 
shines more and more unto the perfect day. What- 
ever heaven is, it is light. Whatever perdition is, 
it is darkness and despair. It is more godlike to 
scatter sunshine than to throw shadows. One day, 
when in doubt about the road we ought to take, our 
interpreter spoke to a Chinaman after this manner : 
" Lend me your lamp, big brother ; lend me your 
c 



34 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

lamp.'' It is the business of every traveler along 
life's highway to carry a good-sized, well-trimmed 
lamp, and to hold it so that it may give guidance 
to those who are hunting the road home. 

Color belongs to the department of light, but 
color is not the same as light. Scientifically they 
are associated, but must not be confused. Pure 
light includes all colors, but betrays no color. The 
prism unravels the threads of light and analyzes 
them into their constituent tints. Some one has 
said God is the great mathematician. One of the 
wonderful features of his works is their mathe- 
matical order. Sounds and colors are purely mathe- 
matical verifications. A proper combination of 
truths produces well-rounded, dependable substance 
for the intellect and the heart, but a bad mixture 
may be fatally misleading, just as the same chemical 
elements differently combined may create medicines 
or poisons. It is a heresy in theology and in science 
to take one or two truths out of their proper setting 
and to present them as the embodiment of all truth. 

It is entirely correct to recognize God's mercy 
and to indulge the delight such a doctrine warrants ; 
but it is heresy of the worst type to conceal his 
justice. The idea of his justice justifies our con- 
fidence in the moral steadfastness of his govern- 
ment, but to leave out his mercy is to cut down our 
sweetest hopes. Heredity has much to do in the 
make-up of any ordinary human life, but none of 
us may charge our ancestors with all we say and 



LIGHT 35 

do. Environment is important in shaping character, 
but the stock with which we started and the volun- 
tary use we have made of our advantages must be 
taken into account in the evening when awards are 
to be made. The old man is what he started with in 
mind and body, plus what was cast into his life by 
his surroundings, plus the voluntary use he has 
made of all these helps and hindrances. Parental 
responsibility is mightily enforced by the doctrine 
of heredity; social obligations are written in the 
doctrine of environment ; and personal responsibility 
is dominant in the doctrine of free will. It takes all 
three of these elements to make up human life. 
Undoubtedly there is a good deal of color-blindness 
among scientists and theologians. We have found 
one or two bewitching colors and have forgotten 
white light. We are enamored of one or two cor- 
rect theories of things material or spiritual, and 
have undertaken to view the whole world through 
glasses of these partial colors. Light and truth are 
composite. 

Of the ministry of light to life, there is not time 
to speak now. Why a stalk of wheat must have 
light in order to make its grain, or why a seeming 
weed can weave wonderful flowers out of the 
August sun, we may not know, any more than we 
can explain why a soul that is to bear good fruit or 
produce beauty of character must needs grow in the 
light of heaven. Because we cannot understand is 
no reason why we should not believe. The hunger- 



36 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

ing of a plant for light is beautifully pathetic. The 
benighted life feels its way in the darkened cellar, 
and at length turns its sightless face toward a small 
window, and if it must perish it persists in perish- 
ing looking for the light. If there is an immortal 
soul looking for heaven's smile, we can describe it 
in terms of plant life and of hungering or thirsting 
for the living sun. No ministry is more vital or 
more unostentatious than that which goes on around 
us every day, in which the plants and animals, so 
various in their form and functions, are alike drink- 
ing in the vital influence of a sun which mothers 
every living thing. 

Light is the revealer. The shadows and screens 
and covers which have been invented to conceal our 
conduct against God and men, are to be torn away, 
and we shall both know and be known. Exposure 
will be the essence of judgment. Light will also 
vindicate those deeds of service and benevolence 
which are too often classed as selfish or fanatical 
or merely spectacular. The things we suffered may 
prove to be the experiences over which we might 
better have rejoiced. Light will bring to our en- 
larged vision outlying fields of truth and power and 
plan embraced in the kingdom of our God. Germs 
of evil will perish beneath health-giving light. 
Poisons will be burned up by the radiance that ex- 
poses them. Every form of life will flourish as in 
the tropics of heaven's favor. The Lamb is the 
light of the new and nobler world. 



Ill 

ACCOUNTABILITY 

It would be difficult to formulate human ac- 
countability in stronger language than that Paul 
used when he said : " We must all appear before the 
judgment-seat of Christ; that every one may receive 
the things done in his body, according to that he 
hath done, whether it be good or bad." We are 
under authority. By nature we are endowed with 
sufficient intelligence to understand what obligation 
means, and in some way there is given us sufficient 
knowledge of what that higher power wants us to 
do. Conscience within answers to law without. 
Moral power implies moral environment and obliga- 
tion. Because of all this, judgment is reasonable 
and inevitable. At some time along our history, 
either now or in the future, we are to receive the 
returns of life. There will come back to us the full 
fruitage of what we have planted. 

Following the language of the Bible, theologians 
have generally understood and have spoken of a 
day of judgment. They have pictured a day when 
the Judge of the universe shall gather before him 
all the race, and the awards of life shall be meted 
out. The picture has included record-books which 

37 



38 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

unerring hands have kept of every transaction. 
Alongside of that record will be placed the unchan- 
ging law, and upon these a decision will be rendered. 
Those whose records fulfil the law are to be sent 
with approving sentence to a heavenly reward, while 
those whose records are short of the requirements 
are to be sent away to dwell with those who forget 
God and who are banished from his presence. 

I have no fault to find with the imagery under 
which human accountability is thus set forth. In 
as plain terms as one could wish, the administra- 
tion of eternal justice is declared. But I must beg 
you not to allow this imagery of a court-room and 
of court proceedings to obscure what is meant, nor 
any small objection you raise to the method of put- 
ting it turn you away from the thing signified. 
When the Scriptures were written, men were 
familiar with criminal court proceedings. Unfortu- 
nately such courts have always been a necessary part 
of earthly transactions. Very naturally the writers 
seized the most familiar and fitting illustration within 
their reach to make plain a final adjustment of right- 
eousness. Here, as elsewhere, we are helped to com- 
prehend the unseen by its likeness to things seen. 
That judgment, whatever its form and whatever 
its date on the docket, includes all men, and it takes 
note of those transactions which have in them moral 
quality. It will not be asked if a man is poor or 
unfortunate or uneducated or obscure, but there will 
be a complete discrimination between what is good 



ACCOUNTABILITY 39 

and what is bad. Here lie the qualities which per- 
sist in fixed character, and upon these the issue will 
be decided. 

I am perfectly willing that modern science shall 
furnish the form and furniture and wording and 
methods of this settlement of the soul's account. 
Nature, poorly as we comprehend her laws and 
processes, has terms and processes which are equal 
to what can be found in any court-room to make 
emphatic to us the inevitable destinies of good and 
evil. Does science teach any lesson akin to the 
teachings we have indicated? Is there anything in 
astronomy or chemistry or biology or physics which 
makes the Bible doctrine of a judgment unreason- 
able? Has nature such a suggestion? Would a 
man thoroughly versed in nature's laws be shocked 
by this Scripture doctrine as by something entirely 
strange to him? I beg to say in advance that I am 
not expecting to find direct proof of this doctrine. 
Science occupies another field. It is limited to time 
and to material substances. But I believe we may 
discover in the administration of nature such like- 
nesses to the doctrine of the judgment, that no sort 
of rational fault can be found with the Scriptures 
on that point. 

The fundamental dictum of science is that every 
substance, animate and inanimate, is subject to law. 
I am grateful to the men who have sought to know 
the what and the how of all things about us, and 
especially for their verdict that law reigns every- 



40 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

where and over all things. It is more comfortable 
to live in a realm of law than in anarchy. Nothing 
happens, nothing is ungoverned, nothing is turned 
loose to do as chance may direct. There is a uni- 
versal plan which causes all material forces to make 
for order, and all moral forces to make for right- 
eousness. What we are talking about now is real 
law; that is, a statement of a rule of life with a 
penalty attached. Without penalty, a law becomes 
a harmless and helpless suggestion. There is a 
definite place and a definite function for each force 
and faculty and member and agent and instrument 
in the world. Law is the program of him who 
governs. Penalty is at least his disapproval of 
failure to obey. It is not a waste of time or effort 
to insist upon this. A suggestion from one pupil to 
another as to the lesson may be disregarded with 
impunity, but the word of a teacher belongs to 
another class and has different consequences. The 
scientist has convinced us that every corner of the 
universe is pervaded by law, and that every sub- 
stance and force he has found is put under rule. 
Failure to obey results in disorder, disarrangement, 
defeat, and injury. The injury is always of a kind 
and degree appropriate to the disobedience and to 
the disobedient. 

Science absolutely confirms, so far as the two 
realms involved allow comparison, the Bible doc- 
trine of human accountability, and the further fea- 
ture that the sinner shall bear the penalty of his own 



ACCOUNTABILITY 4 1 

sins. But science does not quite indorse the familiar 
imagery already referred to of a court- room and of 
a special day and of record testimony. Nature does 
not bring the agent and his destiny into such spec- 
tacular publicity. In most criminal trials in human 
courts it is necessary to go out and gather up testi- 
mony in doubtful scraps, and with much discrimina- 
tion ascertain the reality or extent of guilt. Occa- 
sionally, however, the thief is caught with the goods 
upon his person, or the murderer with the red stains 
on his hand. He brings proof of his guilt with him. 
The doctrine of science is that the soul that sins 
against God is caught with the goods on him. He 
has the testimony in himself. He is his own con- 
demnation. Into his character are woven the in- 
delible records of his own life, graven so deep into 
his moral being that the impress goes through and 
through. 

The photographer catches the image of the face 
or movement which passes before him, and after 
days or years he may unroll the film that brings it 
all to view. The human heart is all the time taking 
a picture of itself, hiding away upon its indestruc- 
tible plates of the soul all the moral experiences 
through which it passes. By and by the time of 
development or of revealing will come. Other tes- 
timony might be questioned or impeached, but not 
this. Every man carries his complete record. 

I used to pass almost daily by an office-building 
where there was hanging in a sort of recess a 



42 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

strange piece of mechanism. It had a face like a 
clock, only it was crossed and marked all over with 
fine lines. Out on the point of what corresponds to 
the hand of a clock, there was a sort of pen, which 
carried red ink. As that hand went around in the 
course of a month there was a clear red mark 
made. And you could look it over and know what 
was the temperature of every day and every hour of 
that week. You could tell the barometric pressure, 
the amount of humidity in the atmosphere, and I 
know not how much else it would have told me if 
I had been clever enough to read its whole story. 
While men slept or toiled, while it was hot and 
while it was cold, that little machine kept its accurate 
record. Changes that your body would never have 
detected were observed with faithful precision. 

We lay all day in the Bay of Kobe, Japan, 
loading and unloading the cargo. The sea was 
almost too rough to go ashore on a steam-launch. 
The waves were high and defiant and irregular. 
Warning came of a possible typhoon. Late in the 
afternoon we steamed away, and at eight o'clock we 
were just at the gate going out into the ocean, with 
our course running northward along a dangerous 
coast. Our captain stopped the vessel, the anchor 
was lowered, and we lay in the sight of a friendly 
light just off there. We were doing that because a 
little piece of glass, a small tube, had registered a 
condition of atmosphere which told of danger. We 
waited all night under an eye that did not go to 



ACCOUNTABILITY 43 

sleep, and we felt safer to abide in the shadow of 
the mighty, if not the Almighty. The storm regis- 
ters itself, and character has its own evidence. 

Have you reason to fear that the great enginery 
of your physical life is running irregularly, that you 
have heart trouble? The doctor puts a piece of 
machinery to your chest, and it brings to him sounds 
and sighings and murmurings of struggle going on 
in there all unheard by dull ears. 

A little scientific construction is given the col- 
lector on a street-car, and every time he takes a 
nickel he pulls a button and a bell rings within. He 
may not touch that record, any more than you may 
open your soul and blot out the handwriting that 
records your indebtedness to moral law. At eve- 
ning, that conductor must settle by a record which 
his own hand has made, but which he could not 
change. 

I tremble to think how every year these scien- 
tists are getting into the inmost secrets of our 
physical and mental life. They can put a sensitive 
disk against the edge of your nerves, and then apply- 
ing a touch to your body, or firing a gun near you, 
they measure the exact time and strength of your 
nervous response to such appeals. It takes some of 
us a longer time to think and feel than others, or it 
takes some of us longer to answer such appeals as 
are made to our senses. 

The creaking of your gas-meter is measuring off 
moment by moment the increase of your monthly bill, 



44 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

and no wish on your part to keep it down has any 
effect. When you turned the key you decided how 
much you were going to use and how large the 
bill is to be. And the same is true of the electric- 
meter. The fact is, there is all about us and over 
us and within us a system of self-registering, accu- 
rate bookkeeping, and by that record we abide. 

There are thousands of earthquakes every year. 
Occasionally there is one that overturns houses and 
destroys life, but most of them are so mild that we 
do not feel their movement. But the scientist has 
constructed a detective appliance, and if a tremor 
occurs at midnight while we are asleep, or if it is 
too faint to be detected in the ordinary way, the 
seismograph marks it down with rigid fidelity. In 
the morning its markings will show exactly when the 
tremor began, how long it continued, from which 
direction it proceeded, and how far away was the 
point of disturbance. The whole earth suffers the 
shock, however gentle it is. One can readily under- 
stand that the moral world may be quite as sensitive 
to the sins which men commit. A thrill of agony 
runs throughout the moral universe when a blow is 
hit, or an oath is uttered, or an innocent life is be- 
trayed, or when a lie is spoken, or when dishonesty 
is practised. Maybe there is a spiritual seismograph 
which records the transaction and measures its vio- 
lence and exactly locates the heart in which the sin 
took place. In the coming daylight every eye may 
read the record and identify the guilty. 



ACCOUNTABILITY 45 

Let us put your moral condition in terms of 
mathematics. When you began life you had certain 
natural powers common to all men ; and along with 
these were certain inheritances from your ancestors, 
such as violent appetites, tendencies to self-indul- 
gence, inherited thirst for drink, a weak body, and a 
weak will. All of these natural and inherited modi- 
fications made up your capital with which you started 
into the business of living. Since then you have 
worked with that capital. Your thinking and feel- 
ing and willing and doing have added to or sub- 
tracted from or modified the original stock with 
which you started. 'An accountant can take up the 
record which lies in your character, and he knows 
that you are now composed of what you started 
with plus what you have done along the way. It 
is a simple question of losses and profits in the 
account. Every year you have lived has witnessed 
that what you have done has increased, while your 
original stock has remained the same in the account. 

Daily you have become less like your ancestors 
and more like yourself. Your good is marked plus 
and your evil is set down as minus. At length the 
sum remaining, whether of profit or of loss, stands 
there in figures which are as true as heaven. You 
are a millionaire or a pauper, and it is unalterable. 
You are your own bookkeeper. Your character is 
self-registering. Science pronounces you a self- 
registering apparatus, and revelation says the same. 

A story is told of certain restless, adventurous, 



46 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

dissatisfied Englishmen who determined to leave 
their native island and find a wider home in a new 
world. They sailed unknown seas and traveled afar 
to find a home that would be to their liking. At 
length one good day they sighted land. Its shores 
were inviting. They landed only to find it occupied 
by people with whose customs they were not quite 
familiar. The natives looked with distrust upon 
these new arrivals, with their tanned complexion 
and their rough manners. But with closer famil- 
iarity the rovers discovered that they had landed 
at Plymouth, the well-known port of their native 
land from which they had sailed, and they found 
that these hesitant citizens were their own brethren. 
Separation had changed somewhat their speech. 
The wanderers had taught themselves to think un- 
kindly of their countrymen, and the dwellers in 
Plymouth had spoken harshly of their fellow-coun- 
trymen who had despised and deserted them. But 
the joy of meeting again, and the better under- 
standing of each other, made their reunion doubly 
grateful. 

It is possible that theologians of the earlier days 
were not always considerate of their neighbors who 
chose to study nature. Possibly the scientists were 
self-willed and arrogant. At any rate, it has been 
hinted that these scientists have wandered far off 
from the homeland, and that they have spoken un- 
kindly of the old faith. We have been in mourning 
over the waywardness of our friends of the labora- 



ACCOUNTABILITY 47 

tory. Indeed, we have mourned them as lost. They 
have at length come upon what they are pleased in 
one way and another to call a new universe and a 
new Bible. They speak a strange dialect to those 
of us who remained at home. But now that we 
are growing more friendly and begin to compare 
notes, it is seen that they are coming back to pretty 
much the same old land and to the original prin- 
ciples. Those of us who have tried to defend the 
old faith have found out that these are our brethren, 
that they had right to protest against some of our 
forms and conclusions. Anyway, they are at home 
with us again, all of us wiser for the separation, and 
we are going to dwell together as neighbors; yes, 
we are going to labor together as fellow-helpers to 
the truth. There will remain many differences of 
opinion and more differences of terminology, but 
we are living under the same sky and facing toward 
the same goal. 

These patient men who have been delving among 
the rocks and walking among the stars, who have 
uncovered our nerves to skilful treatment, and who 
are teaching us what to eat after all these years of 
our practice, these men are worthy of our confidence 
and of our gratitude. They have shown us a larger 
world than we had known; they have stretched out 
the years into millenniums and given us a larger 
conception of the plans of our God; they have 
proved to us the tenderness and delicacy of the 
Father's care over the creatures he has made; they 



48 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

have told us that life has ever been and may con- 
tinue to be God's secret ; and they have told us that 
even in nature there are indications of curative 
and redemptive agencies akin to those which the 
Cross claims. Hereafter we are going to build the 
schoolhouse and the church-house close together, 
so that those who study will also be those who wor- 
ship, and we will come to understand that to know 
is part of worship. 



IV 

PRAYER AND MIRACLES 

Winds and waves do not rise or fall at the bid- 
ding of a human voice. Many a devout passenger at 
sea has cried out in fright and prayer to no seem- 
ing effect. Occasionally those who never thought 
of having family prayer at home have not hesitated 
to kneel with all the other terrified passengers when 
the waves were sweeping the deck. High winds and 
rolling clouds that threatened a cyclone on land have 
been aids to a passing piety born of terror. In few 
of these cases, however, is there decided and indis- 
putable evidence that the storms heeded the cry. 
To say this is not to limit the place of prayer or to 
affirm that God has no regard for those who cry 
to him from out the darkness. 

This common experience forced the disciples to 
comment with wonder upon the fact that the storm 
on the Sea of Galilee sank to quiet as soon as Jesus 
spoke the word of peace. At once they passed to 
the fair conclusion that he was an extraordinary 
manner of man. They may not have formulated it 
in words, but they plainly recognized that this 
marvel was the result of an authoritative person. 
They inferred a superiority of power in the man 
d 49 



SO SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

rather than a mere conjunction of natural forces. 
Intelligent will had intervened and caused natural 
powers to do what they would not have done but 
for such intervention. They themselves had gone 
to him with a petition for sympathy and help. 
Whether they had a hope that he would bring relief 
in this way, or whether they merely summoned him 
to share their common danger, we do not know, but 
they came to see that this strange occurrence could 
be explained in no other way than by recognizing 
the supremacy of Jesus over wind and wave. Their 
explanation of miracle and of answer to prayer was 
found in their dawning estimate of his divinity. 

If the records of the New Testament telling of 
miracles wrought by Jesus are trustworthy, and if 
the instances of the answer of prayer are believed, 
it is because there is at least an admission of the 
existence of God, who made and who controls all 
things. There can be no valid objection to a miracle 
if there is such a God as the Bible sets before us. 
Those who deny the possibility of miracles are either 
those who deny his existence or who have reduced 
him to such insignificant dimensions that he is a 
helpless spectator of what goes on. 

Let me put in here the caution which I have filed 
already, that we must not expect to find in nature 
a full vindication of our blessed doctrine of prayer, 
or a complete explanation of how those occurrences 
which we call miracles, have come to pass. Such 
events, if they occur at all, do not find their counter- 



PRAYER AND MIRACLES 51 

part in the fields or the orchards, where all things 
follow along in what seems to be an unvarying 
course. They belong rather to the family, where 
a father is recognized as having liberty to vary 
within certain limits the laws of the home and to 
listen to the pleadings of his children. He can 
caress one who has been especially dutiful; he can 
punish one who has been disobedient; he can in- 
crease or lighten a task ; he can do a hundred things 
which his will dictates. It has never seemed im- 
possible for a mother to give bread to her child 
or to comfort one that is in trouble. All of these 
important dealings of intelligent love with the little 
ones, and the larger as well, are perfectly legitimate 
in the realm where love and intelligence have sway. 
If we were to inaugurate a rule in the homes as 
pitiless and as cast-iron as the skeptic would have 
us believe prevails in nature, there would be wreck- 
age in the whole beautiful world of home life. If 
God is our Father, he has at least as much latitude 
in dealing with his children as earthly parents have 
with theirs. He knows how to give good gifts to 
them that ask him. We ought to remember too, that 
parental providence is natural. When we undertake 
to reason from nature, the ordinary occurrences of 
the home life are quite as natural as chemical affinity 
and the blowing of the wind. Naturalists must not 
confine " nature " to inanimate and insensate nature. 
Thus far there has been no definite agreement as 
to what constitutes a miracle, and in the absence 



52 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

of such definition there will continue to be debate as 
to whether a miracle can possibly take place. At 
first it was affirmed that a miracle is a violation of 
the laws of nature, and then miracles were disputed 
for the reason that it was supposed that nature's 
laws are inviolable. If these two propositions are 
admitted, miracles are out of the question. An- 
swer to prayer becomes to our thinking a contra- 
diction if everything is in a fixed groove and there 
is no possibility of changing the program. There is 
a way of stating these opinions that rules all an- 
swer to prayer and all miracle entirely out. But it 
is not certain that all natural laws are inviolable in 
the above sense; it is not established that a miracle 
is performed in violation of law; it may be that two 
of nature's laws may unite and so modify each other 
that the result will be different from that which 
either one of them would have produced if they had 
operated separately. 

Last of all, the current objections to miracle have 
all ignored entirely the existence of mind and its 
superiority to the forces of matter. Probably as 
good a definition as we can frame for ordinary use 
is the one which defines miracle as an act of mind 
controlling matter, controlling it possibly according 
to natural law, so that the forces of nature do what 
they never would have done except for this direct 
intervention of mind. If this definition is approxi- 
mately fair, and if it is admitted that even within 
narrow limits a man may thus modify the course 



PRAYER AND MIRACLES 53 

of nature and bring about consequences that would 
not otherwise occur, then it surely follows that God 
has liberty to enter into the works of his hands 
and exercise a greater control. He surely can inter- 
vene in realms in which he is an acknowledged 
Creator. The doctrine of miracles does not under- 
take to affirm that every imaginable and fanciful 
sort of occurrence can be produced. There are con- 
tradictions which are impossibilities. Maybe God 
cannot make two hills without a hollow between 
them, since the terms of the task are contradictory. 
Men in their smartest inventions are limited; pos- 
sibly God has limited himself. One case of inter- 
vention by mind to modify the ordinary process of 
natural law vindicates the possibility of miracle and 
of answer to prayer. 

There were skeptics when it was first announced 
that a dull wire a hundred miles long had carried 
a human thought through its long distance and de- 
livered it in good shape at the other end. That was 
an absolute and radical contradiction of all the com- 
monly known laws of sound and thought. But this 
man spoke through his touch, he was heard far off, 
and an answer quick as lightning came back to him. 
He had to be a scientist; at least he had to be 
trained in the language and meaning of his touch, 
but communication was established. That was a 
genuine miracle to the ordinary theology and science 
of that day. Nature never did and never will string 
wires and invent keys and send messages, certainly 



54 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

not in the ordinary workings of nature. Mind has 
come in and done this. 

A little later the telephone was invented. It never 
grew up out of nature as an apple tree grows or 
as a rain-cloud grows, but it came out of a mind. 
A man decided he wanted something done that 
nature had not produced, and probably never would 
produce of itself. The mind made out of common 
material the wire and the mouthpiece and the 
receiver and the battery. Nature was not violated, 
but used and modified. This mechanism did what 
had never been done before, it carried the human 
voice a thousand miles and whispered your words, 
in your tone and accents, into the ear of your 
familiar friend. Nor do you have to be a scien- 
tist to use the instrument. What do you care as to 
the exact laws of resistance and non-conductors and 
insulation and electrical waves ? You know as little 
about these conditions as you know of the secret 
working of divine providence when you pray, but 
you speak to your friend as you talk to God. 

Finally they took down the wire and began to 
talk through blank space. Over the seas and 
through the storms the unseen and pathless message 
wings its flight, and is caught by one who listens for 
it. We are creatures of sight, and so long as we 
could see the wire running along above us, we felt 
that there was a sort of tangible explanation, but the 
wireless method is a miracle to common understand- 
ing, and it is as completely a miracle, within the 



PRAYER AND MIRACLES 55 

realm of human control in nature, as walking on 
the sea was a miracle in the range of our Saviour's 
experience. 

I cannot dismiss these now familiar achievements 
of scientific invention until I beg you to consider 
how much they mean in this connection. Do you 
understand in the least how your friend a hundred 
miles away listened last night to your secret con- 
fidences, or caught the laughter of your voice, or 
joined you in tears as you told of some deep sor- 
row ? Not thoughts alone, but the most sacred and 
delicate of affections speed along. The heart goes 
all the way. Are you refusing to believe because 
you do not understand? Did you refuse to believe 
the loved ones were in distress when you got their 
message ; did you deny it all because you could not 
explain ; did you stay at home and treat the alleged 
message as a joke? By no means. You received 
it as sad but veritable fact. You changed your pro- 
gram, you canceled your engagements, and you 
took the next train. 

Surely you have no word of derision for the 
troubled soul that goes into a closet as shut in as 
the booth of your long-distance telephone, and there 
where none but God can hear pours out its tale of 
sorrow to the heavenly Father, with confidence that 
he hears. If there is a discouraged soul which has 
been driven from prayer by a skeptical and utterly 
unreasonable objection, I want to awaken fresh 
confidence. One hundred millions of intelligent peo- 



56 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

pie in this country, and a hundred times as many 
more in other countries, have just been converted to 
a belief that messages can go afar, even without 
wires, and that the voice of the praying one is heard 
in the secret places. 

The universe is a speaking gallery, and God is 
keen of hearing. We do not explain how we talk 
to each other, nor how we hear each other; how 
dare we then limit the soul's converse with God? 
We are in God's kindergarten, learning large lessons 
from our little blocks and pictures and marbles and 
tops. Right before our eyes he performs these ex- 
periments, simple and significant, to teach us the 
higher lessons. Just as a skeptic was troubling my 
faith by saying that God could not hear me in 
heaven, the scientist was telling me I could speak 
to my friend in St. Louis. Just as the skeptic was 
assuring me that I could not pray with assurance 
because, forsooth, I could not give a rational ex- 
planation of prayer, my scientist friend was letting 
me talk over a wire which reached St. Louis, a 
wire that was pervaded by an electric force which 
no man can explain, and I was doing the talking in 
absolute violation of all the natural forces ever 
known. Apart from control by an intelligent mind, 
there would never have been a telephone and a wire- 
less telegraphy, and yet we have them now in per- 
fect accord with natural law. I believe prayer has 
its place in the laws and ways of God. You may 
puzzle me with questions I cannot answer as to how 



PRAYER AND MIRACLES 57 

it all comes about, but it is impossible neither to 
love nor to law that God hears his people and that 
he can visit them with deliverance. 

A variation of the objection to prayer is the af- 
firmation that there is a predetermined schedule on 
which all things are running, and any interference 
with this fixed order would throw the entire uni- 
verse into hopeless disorder. So far as we know, if 
one of the great central suns of the heavens should 
be thrust out of its place, confusion in the whole 
family of stars would follow. We can merely guess 
what might occur, for we have had only a glimpse 
of the time-table and the plans. But we are not 
now talking about what may be considered impos- 
sibilities and wide-spread revolutions. The doc- 
trine of miracles does not undertake to have the 
impossible and the unwarranted come to pass. We 
are examining into a possible control which mind 
has over matter within the limits of our experi- 
ence. We are merely inquiring whether our Father 
has sufficient management of material and spiritual 
forces, that he can do what he chooses to do outside 
of what inanimate nature would do if left alone, 
and whether he can manifest to us his present con- 
trol of the works of his hands. We are asking if 
he built a wonderful piece of machinery and then 
leased it out so that it is not under his management, 
or whether it is still subject to his will. We are not 
just now looking to the Scriptures to confirm or 
deny our faith. We are simply inquiring of the 



58 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

scientist to learn whether nature is closed to sug- 
gestions of mind, or whether nature lends herself 
willingly to bring about results she would not have 
produced if left alone. 

A man invents a machine. Into that invention 
he puts no material except what God made, and the 
material carries with it into that invention only 
the properties and attributes which God gave it. 
The inventor constructs his mechanism with the 
faith that the forces of nature will act uniformly. 
This inviolability of law is the one thing he must 
depend on. Not one rule of nature is violated in 
the construction, and it is not proposed to violate 
one in the operation. The machine is worthless 
unless law-abiding, and unless law continues as in 
the past. The inventor never admits for a moment 
that the machine is going to be out of his control 
the moment it begins to move. He is not expecting 
to violate it, but he expects to control it. He made 
it so that he could drill a large or a small hole in 
the rock; or that he could plane a board thick or 
thin; or that it would run faster or slower as he 
might regulate it; or that it would make long or 
short stitches as he chose to set the screw; or that 
it would carry stone to the third floor or the twelfth ; 
or that it would sail to the south or to the north as 
he chose, and not merely as the wind might be blow- 
ing. All human devices in the way of machinery to 
save labor and to manufacture conveniences for 
human life, are creations of mind, creations made 



PRAYER AND MIRACLES 59 

out of material that is subject to uniform and uni- 
versal law, and out of material that is not asked to 
do anything but serve law in its new relation. 

You would not take passage on a steamer if the 
captain told you it was a ship without compass and 
rudder and guidance. You want to know that every 
sail responds to the breeze, and that the rudder is 
in the hands of a man who can follow the course 
this way or that. It must be good coal in the 
bunkers, and the laws of combustion and expan- 
sion and application of power must be preserved, 
not violated. It is conformity to law, not violation 
of law, that makes a ship dependable. The vessel 
itself and its safe movement to a definite port are 
alike miraculous, without being a violation of law or 
a destruction of order. You would not take a ride in 
an automobile if the chauffeur or the builder should 
put it in the same class as that in which the skeptic 
puts this world. No, it must be a machine which 
a man can stop or slow down or turn about. The 
wreckage which lies along the automobile path is 
because of some careless or inadvertent or rash at- 
tempt to defy the rules of nature. Its miraculous 
structure and movement are perfectly natural, but 
possible only because mind has led nature to do 
what nature never would have done. 

Answer to prayer, while not always involving the 
miraculous, generally has reference to material and 
temporal affairs. Both questions involve the prob- 
lem of God's ability to intervene in nature and im- 



60 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

press his will upon results which otherwise might 
not have come about. But even here we have some 
wonderfully suggestive illustrations from daily ex- 
perience. You are standing on a street corner, 
wanting to ride down-town. You put confidence 
even in the time-table of an electric company. 
At length the massive steel car swings around 
a corner and comes thundering toward you ten 
miles an hour. The whole thing as to why it runs 
is to you a mystery. In that little wire overhead, 
not larger than a pencil, there runs a current of 
power. You cannot see nor hear nor know it in 
any direct way. But that wire carries sufficient 
force to run twenty cars. You cannot stop that 
car. To stand before it is to be crushed. Its 
power is irresistible, its law of action inviolable. 
Back of it is a tremendous power-house that will 
go right on for hours pouring its energy into this 
car. You do not know why it runs, and you do not 
see how it can ever stop. What can you do ? Pray ? 
Yes, that is all you can do. You hold up your hand, 
and the car obeys your voice as completely as the 
winds and the waves obeyed Jesus. It stops right 
at your feet. You step on safely, and then it moves 
right on. This little transaction involved the far- 
reaching principle of running a universe in which 
mind dwells with matter and holds control of 
nature. 

Our only conception of God is to think of him 
in terms of humanity. He is a great man. He 



PRAYER AND MIRACLES 6 1 

thinks, and we do not know how he thinks except 
as we think. He wills and wishes and plans and 
has mercy and wisdom and justice. And so if we 
are to have any conception of how he executes his 
will and carries on the affairs of the kingdom, we 
are forced to use our own experiences. And for 
that reason I have dwelt largely on the familiar 
things to reach a just comprehension of him. There 
occurs every day all about us, and under our own 
hands, exactly the same sort of exercise of mind 
over matter that a miracle involves. We enter into 
partnership with our Father. He puts us into his 
workshop and teaches us gradually how to use the 
edged tools and how to put nature to work for 
us in lifting our burdens and furnishing our com- 
forts. 

Those who accept the Bible have held for a long 
time to the unfailing benevolence of God in the 
kingdom of grace. We have counted Jesus the 
friend of man. Perhaps we have not understood 
quite so well that in this temporal world there is 
also the wonderful evidence that in wisdom and in 
love for his creatures he made all these things. This 
good old home is stored full of substantials and 
dainties, rich with material for the endowment of 
mind and body. This is your Father's house, and 
we are just beginning to enjoy it. He is at home 
too; he is not gone afar off. It is all yours. Ac- 
cept it from his hand, thank him, worship him. 



V 

SIN AND ITS REMEDY 

The Bible doctrine of sin has in it no elements 
that are unheard of in human experience. It is only 
common speech to talk of breaking a law, or viola- 
ting a law, or transgressing against a law. These are 
words of practically the same meaning, and they are 
familiar to all. The conditions are that one shall 
be under a rule of action, obligated to obey it, but 
exercising liberty to disobey it. To violate the law 
of truth is to be in error, to violate the law of health 
is to incur sickness, to break criminal law is to 
become a criminal. The Bible says that sin is a trans- 
gression of the law of God given for our direc- 
tion in moral and spiritual matters. One who vio- 
lates this law is a sinner. It is with respect to sin 
that the Scriptures were given. It was to save men 
from sin that Jesus came to earth and suffered 
death. 

Sin produces disabilities in human life that make 
a remedy highly important. Further, there are but 
two courses God can pursue with respect to sin: 
He can treat the sinner as if he had done nothing 
out of the way, either by approving sin or by ignor- 
ing it. Such a course would be an indorsement of 
62 



SIN AND ITS REMEDY 63 

sin and would introduce anarchy. The second 
course for him to pursue is to require a measure of 
penalty commensurate with the transgression. This 
much our ideas of justice require. 

Since God is the author of law, he only can either 
punish or pardon. These functions of government 
of necessity belong to the law-enacting power. If 
any man assumes to have authority to pardon me 
when I confess to him, he must also claim the 
right to punish me when I refuse to confess. If 
he seeks to modify his claim and explains that he 
merely speaks the word of pardon in behalf of the 
power he represents, then he must claim the equal 
authority to speak my punishment, no matter into 
whose hands he consigns me for the administration 
of that punishment. 

But now that we are studying this subject in the 
light of nature rather than in the teachings of the 
Bible, we look to nature for parallel conditions or 
similar facts. Though the two kingdoms are alike 
in having laws and are alike in having penalties 
for transgression, there are some noticeable dif- 
ferences. The word of pardon is not found in 
nature. One who is sick from overeating may find 
palliatives and curative medicines, but this is not 
pardon. Forces in this lower world are charged 
with a uniformity which the scientist does not 
allow us to forget. Cause and effect grind along 
without pity or mercy or grace. The only likeness 
to divine grace is found in the higher circle of 



64 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

human life. A father may forgive. Forgiveness 
may prove to be the highest function of the fatherly 
office, and it may be the crowning glory of family 
government. But we are here over the line in the 
spiritual; nature has no fatherhood of that type. 

There is a doctrine of race depravity, of trans- 
mitted conditions, of inherited sinfulness. Our first 
parents disobeyed God, and as a consequence of that 
the whole race is traveling on a low plane. All 
Adam's children are put in this one class, even 
though they did not consent to the original sin, nor 
have they committed any act exactly like the one in 
the garden. To this doctrine the world has con- 
stantly and almost bitterly objected. Without 
claiming to pass upon a question so far above us, 
we may inquire whether our best judgment and 
our observation support such a protest. Is the doc- 
trine wholly or essentially unjust and unreason- 
able? Is it a thing standing out by itself, totally 
unlike what God has done in nature and in provi- 
dence? If heredity is a law of the universe in 
every other area, there is created a presumption in 
its support. 

The scientific doctrine of heredity is firmly estab- 
lished. Like begets like, and that law extends to 
the largest and smallest patterns of life. Our whole 
system of knowledge based upon nature would go 
to the winds without this. The breeding of animals 
for use or sport, the development of flowers and 
fruits, affirm the law. It is the only hope of the 



SIN AND ITS REMEDY 65 

farmer, and it is the only policy of the investigator. 
The bird-dog goes to the fields for the first time, 
and in his service betrays the exact family to which 
he belongs; he has qualities which he never ac- 
quired. Bees are hatched in the springtime and go 
at once to making cells as perfect as any bee ever 
made them, cells which are mathematically and 
architecturally perfect. This fall young geese and 
ducks will pass over us going southward to where 
the waters will be open all winter and where food 
will be abundant. They never studied climatic 
changes. They have never seen nor heard of a 
northern winter. No naturalist can begin to tell 
you how they got that knowledge, nor how they can 
locate places or determine directions. Yes, we say 
it is instinct, and that is exactly the objectionable 
doctrine of heredity as declared in the Bible. Mr. 
Burbank knows he can depend on the continuance 
of certain forms of plant life, and while he makes 
his improvements out of the slight variation that 
may occur, he has to count absolutely on the per- 
petuation of inherited qualities. 

When we enter the laboratory of the biologist we 
come into the sacred places of inheritance. This is 
a sort of holy of holies. We are just now hearing 
the evidence of the biologist, and we will hear him 
without passing judgment on some of his other 
theories. He goes back along the path of an in- 
dividual life until he places under a microscope 
what he calls a cell. It is hardly more to the eye, 

E 



66 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

looking through a strong glass, than a milky drop 
of water. But the scientist says it is the cradle of 
a life. In that cell he says there is everything to 
determine whether the animal to grow out of it is 
going to be a fish or a fowl. Suppose it is a fowl, 
he will tell you that it may be a humming-bird, or 
it may be an eagle ; it may be a crow with its coarse 
voice, or it may be a mocking-bird with its brilliant 
song ; it may be a wren, timid and gentle, or it may 
be an eagle, daring and puissant. Who knows? 
Not science ; but nature says it is going to be like its 
parentage. All the story of its past is written there. 
And so every animal brings with it the sins and the 
services of its ancestors. Like these are the curses 
and blessings which came to us from our fathers; 
in this way we are blessing or cursing the coming 
generations. The doctrine of inherited sin is at 
home in this world, both in the field of daily obser- 
vation and in the laboratory. 

The man with a microscope goes even farther. We 
can hardly do more than simply hear a word from 
him. He says that an individual comes up through 
a series of transformations which reproduce all the 
ancestral forms of life through which he has passed. 
The embryo is every animal in succession from 
which he has sprung. The child is the father and 
the mother reproduced, and he affirms that in 
this ancestral tablet hung up in your heart's cham- 
ber are all the animals which developed into you. I 
prefer not to comment on what he tells us, but I am 



SIN AND ITS REMEDY 67 

amazed that he goes farther than the Scriptures 
have ever gone, and farther than theologians ever 
went in declaring that all of the parents' marks of 
body, and molds of mind, and peculiarities of dis- 
position follow on down the line and come out 
visibly in every individual of that race. The af- 
firmation of Adamic sin is mild, it is easy to believe 
compared with the scientific teaching. While it may 
not be true literally that when the parents eat grapes 
the children's teeth are set on edge, it is true that 
they get the color of their hair and the form 
of their face and their perverse dispositions from 
their parents. And the remarkable thing is that 
the sacred writers put this down a long time before 
those students of nature were born, and it is still 
there after all that has been said to the contrary. 

We come now in our advance to a statement of 
the New Testament which has called forth no little 
protest and some ridicule. I refer to the belief in 
demoniacal possession. Men were thought to be 
possessed of demons, and this was part of the sin- 
ful condition of the race. Whether that was a 
prevalent delusion to which Jesus simply referred 
without either indorsing or denying it, or whether 
he affirmed its reality, we need not consider. I am 
merely turning aside to note how nearly that belief 
is like the modern theory of disease. There is no 
claim that any scientist has analyzed the body or 
the spirit and found a genuine evil spirit occupying 
the premises. Such an intruder could not be 



68 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

reached by the appliances of a laboratory. We are 
all coming to be familiar even to painfulness with 
the germ theory of disease. A dozen or more of 
our bodily ailments are found to be the result of 
an invasion of foreign forces, vegetable or animal, 
which march up and down the red paths of life, and 
play havoc with our comfort. They afflict us with 
fevers and consumption and cancer and chronic 
weariness. We are marching through an enemy's 
country and are subject to attack at every step. 
A squad of any one of these hostile forces may 
find lodgment in our system, recruit their numbers, 
build their fortifications, and storm the citadel. Our 
only hope is to build up a better fighting army. A 
battle royal is on. The doctor goes to work to 
exorcise the demons, which are legion, and then a 
million legions more. The symptoms of germ pos- 
session are various and often violent. Each enemy 
has its own way of influencing us. When the cure 
is effected, if such is the happy issue of the conflict, 
the victim is probably left limp as in the days of 
the Saviour. Demons and germs are parasites which 
seek to live upon our strength and devour us with 
their poisons. 

A pathologist is called in to pass upon the ailment 
of a patient. He takes a drop of blood from any 
part of the body and puts it under a microscope. In 
that drop he reads what is in every drop of blood 
throughout the entire body. The infection which is 
producing fever or lassitude or eruptions or excess- 



SIN AND ITS REMEDY 69 

ive heart action has permeated the whole circula- 
tion. There is no soundness from crown of head 
to sole of foot. The patient may not be so sick as 
some one else, nor so sick as he is going to be later, 
but he is sick with that disease in every portion 
of his body. He is just as thoroughly invaded and 
possessed and dominated by that disease as any 
theologian has ever represented the soul to be per- 
meated by sin when he spoke of total depravity. 

And now let us turn from a consideration of sin 
to an inquiry as to its remedy. We are to investi- 
gate whether science has any transactions which bear 
resemblance to that doctrine of grace which assures 
the sinner that there is escape from the penalties or 
results of his transgression of the law of God. We 
are face to face with the most serious problem of ex- 
perience as well as of thought. Perhaps here more 
than elsewhere the dealings of God with the soul 
are peculiar. In instituting a scheme of redemp- 
tion for moral transgressors, a new field is entered, 
and in the nature of the case there is nothing like 
it in the universe. We are trying to find in rougher, 
coarser nature a picture of the most delicate opera- 
tion in the refined processes of grace. Let us not 
demand the impossible or the unreasonable. We 
ask the scientist if in his careful investigation of 
nature he has found any process which makes it 
easier and more reasonable for him to understand 
how the sufferings of Christ as my friend may in 
some way bring relief and healing to my sinning 



70 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

soul. We will hear him as he tells us of remark- 
able occurrences in both the vegetable and the animal 
world. 

The nurseryman is a scientist, not always up in 
the theories, but a practical scientist. He takes a 
wild vine grown in the forest. It is a hardy stock. 
The difficulty with it is it bears only hard, sour 
grapes. He cuts it off bodily, or opens a gash in 
its side. Then he gently inserts in this opening a 
twig or bud brought from another vine which bears 
good fruit. He removes all the branches of the old 
stock and proceeds to make the entire tree of the 
imported variety. There is a complete destruction 
of the fruit-bearing parts of the old, and when his 
operation is successful he says the old is passed 
away and all is new. Henceforth it bears the flower 
and fruit of the ingrafted variety. The transforma- 
tion is as thorough as the regeneration of a soul 
which dies to sin and is made alive to righteousness. 
The believer must first turn away from the past, 
and then put on the new man which in Christ Jesus 
is created unto a new and good fruitage. The 
process of grafting is outward and visible, but the 
flowing of a vital current up through the breach and 
into the branch is a hidden process. It is a mys- 
tery to the vine-dresser. He cannot know it has 
been effective until he sees leaf and fruitage as 
proof of a real union. One might accurately de- 
scribe the whole process in words of the New 
Testament used to set forth that change from a 



SIN AND ITS REMEDY 7 1 

state of separation from God to fellowship with 
him through Jesus Christ. " The life which I now 
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of 
God." "Your life is hid with Christ in God." 
Because he lives, we shall live also. 

Passing now to the higher realm of physical life, 
we meet other testimonies of this method of re- 
demption. For some cause, a patient has lost blood, 
until a weakness which means death has ensued. 
The machinery is not making sufficient blood, and 
the life is in the blood. The feat, though rare and 
difficult, has been accomplished of opening the veins 
of a healthy, full-blooded man, and of pouring his 
life-current into the depleted veins of the patient. 
He gave of his life to be the life of another. It was 
a literal illustration of impartation and imputation. 
And beside that operating-table the sacred scenes 
of the cross are enacted in wonderful likeness. If 
a skilful surgeon had undertaken to make in the 
physical an exact picture of the atonement, he could 
hardly have constructed a more striking picture 
than this which was made by men who never once 
had in mind to illustrate divine truth. Beside that 
operating-table the scientist and the preacher can 
work together, and they can minister to soul and 
body in practically the same words. It is one gospel 
which promises healing to spirit and body. 

One more illustration from the sacred art of the 
physician will be all we can examine. The germ 
theory of disease has opened the way to a larger 



J2 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

ministry of healing through the use of serums and 
antitoxins. One who is not skilled in the use of 
medical terms and who is only an ordinary layman in 
these matters can speak only in general and popular 
terms. If I succeed in getting the familiar facts I 
shall have done what I am aiming to do, hoping 
in so doing to avoid any blunders which might vitiate 
the force of the facts. We may take smallpox as 
the best known disease for this treatment. It is 
one of the afflictions which, like sin, is contagious, 
but it has to become one's own before it works him 
fatal harm. For a long time this stood at the head 
of the list of loathsome, dangerous contagions. 
There was no cure for it, and the palliatives were of 
doubtful efficacy. Nursing and prevention were re- 
lied upon. By and by, without aiming to do so, the 
doctors adopted the Bible doctrine of the atonement, 
and from that day till now this disease has lost most 
of its dread power. The world may or may not be 
growing better in a moral sense, but our physicians 
have robbed some diseases of their sting, and this 
one in particular has been toned down to compara- 
tive mildness. But we are concerned now only 
with the process by which this has come about. 

They took a lamb or bullock and began the work 
of cure clear outside of the patient. The sacrifice, 
for such it was, had to be without blemish, lest in 
hunting for a cure a worse malady should be intro- 
duced. This bullock was made an offering for dis- 
ease, though by nature it knew no such disease. 



SIN AND ITS REMEDY 73 

They imputed to it the poison of another life. It 
went through the suffering forced upon it, and at 
length conquered the poison in its own strength. As 
a lamb led to the slaughter it bore in silence the 
curse of another. It suffered, but not for its own 
sake. After its triumph was assured and the results 
of the victory were part of its own blood, that 
merit was drawn off in its crimson offering and 
the virtue of it all was imparted to the veins of 
one who is threatened with the disease. The dis- 
ease was imputed to the victim, and the merit of 
the victim was imputed to the human being, and 
the result was immunity, partial or complete, from 
the death which threatened. 

We may not send a minister of the gospel to the 
public school with a serum which introduced will 
save the pupils from lying and anger and theft and 
sinful thoughts. Moral disease must be met with 
moral remedies in the realm of intelligent and will- 
ing acceptance of Jesus Christ. And yet, who can 
see this wise and scientific and beneficent protection 
of physical welfare without hoping that the heavenly 
Father, who made such protection possible, has also 
a remedy for sin? And who can read the Bible 
offer of soul-saving through the sacrifice of Christ 
and not recognize the close resemblance between 
the gospel of the physician and the gospel of the 
preacher? The discoverer of vaccination had only 
to look up at the cross and find that what he had 
found in nature was already written on the cross. 



74 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

I am giving no theory of the atonement, any more 
than there is a clear exposition of what occurs in 
vaccination. How Jesus could die for us and secure 
our salvation is a mystery, but it may be a blessed 
fact of experience despite my ignorance. Even 
physical science recommends that we accept the 
statement that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth 
from all sin. 

It would be worth while, if we had time, to stop 
and recall those many Scriptures which talk to us of 
redemption through him. He tasted death for every 
man; undoubtedly that means that he provided a 
cure which is effective for every one who will accept 
it. With his stripes we are healed ; it was his humil- 
iation and pain that secured release for us. We are 
not guilty of heresy or of superstition when we sing 
" Jesus paid it all." 

At length a number of perilous diseases, such as 
rabies, meningitis, diphtheria, typhoid fever, and 
others have been brought into the same class with 
smallpox, and we dream of the time when all can 
be cured, even to the uttermost, who trust the aton- 
ing sufferings of an accepted substitute. 

As a preacher I have no license to tell any man 
that because he has a complete Saviour, therefore 
he can sin as much as he likes. A perfect salvation 
does not mean license to do evil. Paul had to say 
a word, and he said it with emphasis, in answer to 
those who proposed to sin more that grace might 
abound more. Nevertheless, I do find in the Scrip- 



SIN AND ITS REMEDY 75 

tures a comfortable assurance to believers of their 
security in the Lord. He gives protection to the 
saints. " There is ... no condemnation to them 
which are in Christ Jesus." This doctrine of the 
safety of believers has been made the object of 
violent criticism. And yet I find nature provides 
immunity to certain people and on certain con- 
ditions. There are, for example, a number of dis- 
eases which, as a rule, come but once. Measles and 
whooping-cough and smallpox and others well 
known are of this kind. Is it not singular that when 
the disease has gone through the body once the 
way is closed against it ever afterward? Normally 
one might live a hundred years and suffer exposure 
every day without the least danger of falling under 
the contagion. Supposably some anatomical or 
physiological change takes place while the disease is 
on that makes its return impossible. That element 
of the body which the disease preys upon is des- 
troyed, or a fortification is built up which safe- 
guards the life for all time to come. There is not 
a scientist of any sort who can even begin to tell 
you what nature does or suffers to bring immunity, 
but it is secured. Then when I am assured that 
believers " shall not come into condemnation," that 
no one shall pluck them out of his hand, I remember 
the lesson we have just had from science, and I 
say, the same God is likely to follow the same 
general plan in these two worlds which, after all, 
are but one in his hand. 



76 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

Once more I enter my disclaimer. We are not 
proving by the scientist that the Bible is worthy of 
belief. We are not proving the doctrines of the 
Scripture from the field of science. Spiritual truths 
must have their own validation, and their verifica- 
tion cannot be made wholly outside of the field of 
the spiritual. What I have sought to do was to find 
some likenesses. If the same God made the soul 
and made also the material world, then probably we 
can find finger-marks on the one like the finger- 
marks on the other. Maybe he was thinking of 
the spirit when he made the flowers, and possibly 
the fragrance in the flower was the thought he was 
just at the moment holding concerning his children 
who were coming soon to walk among his flowers. 
He left the thought there for them to read. 



VI 

THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN 

One of the familiar objections made to our re- 
ligion is that we are dealing with the unseen, the 
imaginary, the unreal. Theology is looked upon as 
a structure built on theories which have not been 
demonstrated, while science rests on facts which 
are all verifiable by careful observation and re- 
liable testing. 

There is a semblance of truth in this comparison, 
but it is far from the whole truth. The business 
world has to do with actual goods, unless it is specu- 
lating in futures. Money and grain and hardware 
and drygoods and town lots stand out to be seen 
and weighed and measured. A scientist states his 
theory, and then with a test-tube we can see through 
and with scales we may handle and with liquids 
right before our eyes, he performs his experiment 
and we see the whole process take place. One 
turns a crank or pushes a button or holds a glass 
toward the stars or measures the length of a sound 
wave, and our senses pronounce themselves con- 
vinced. These men are out in the open and their 
experiments are convincing. 

But the preacher must tell you about a soul sub- 

77 



yS SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

stance you have never seen; he speaks of an endless 
life which stretches out into the unexplored future ; 
he insists upon the constant overshadowing of a 
divine presence ; he bids conformity to a moral law 
that is not found fully in a formal code; he appeals 
to a conscience which may or may not consent to its 
responsibility; and he holds up rewards and penal- 
ties which are not yet in evidence. And so it comes 
about that sincere souls are in more or less doubt as 
to the reality of all the claims which religion puts 
up for its vindication. More or less we have 
adopted a faulty principle for our practical use, that 
nothing is real unless it can be measured by a yard- 
stick or weighed in scales or subjected to chemical 
tests. Probably half the unbelieving world and 
maybe a considerable percentage of believers have 
an idea that science is a demonstration from start 
to finish, while theology is a guess from beginning 
to end. 

It is worth while to stop long enough to inquire 
if this comparison is a fair one. Religion might 
rest on assumptions and still be true, but evidently 
it will be greatly commended to our confidence if we 
discover that it is quite up with science as to its 
substantial foundations. No truth is going to injure 
either religion or science, no matter from which 
realm that truth is drawn. 

Paul says with utmost clearness that we have to 
do with two classes of reality — one the seen and 
the other the unseen. The seen is the one which 



THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN 79 

lies very close to us and appeals to our sense; it 
is temporal, it belongs to an order which is passing 
away, limited in time and space. The unseen does 
not come to us through the senses ; it lies very close 
to us, but its presence is not impressive ; this unseen 
belongs to the things which abide forever. 

A reverent student of nature has a sacred call- 
ing. He is following the footprints of the Maker 
of all things. He is reading God's thoughts written 
in material volumes. Whatever he tells me my 
Father says and does in nature, I am going to accept 
with something of the same reverence with which 
I regard his will written in the Bible. My only con- 
cern just now is that we shall not allow ourselves 
to be cheated out of a rich inheritance on the mis- 
taken charge that we study nature in the light and 
study revelation in the dark. 

There is a considerable list of words which go 
in pairs, describing this same general distinction. 
We speak of the material and the immaterial, the 
seen and the unseen, the temporal and the eternal, 
the finite and the infinite. Let us not hastily con- 
clude that these mean the same as real and unreal, 
the demonstrated and the speculative, the true and 
the untrue. We see many things we do not know, 
we know many things we do not see, and in every 
department of life we accept and depend on many 
things we do not comprehend and believe in what 
we cannot prove. 

In order to come at once to the faulty distinction 



80 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

which has been made in describing the material as 
real and the spiritual as unreal, I venture to say that 
the scientist has made just as many assumptions 
as the theologian, and his assumptions are just as 
vital to the validity of his theories. Underneath 
the entire structure of science there is a foundation 
made up of assumptions and things taken for 
granted. In no department of knowledge have we 
been able to begin with the beginning. When we 
enrolled and started to learn, school was already in 
session, the text-books were there before us, rules 
of procedure were posted up, and we began with the 
class where we found it. If you will let me change 
the figure, I will liken the situation to a great 
factory. You are admitted as a workman to put 
in your little day. You do not know who built 
the factory, or how the machinery was installed, 
or when the affair was put into operation, or where 
the raw material comes from, or whether the 
machinery has been running for all time just as it 
is now running, nor have you liberty to go down 
into the engine-room and inspect all the machinery 
involved. You study what is in sight, you compre- 
hend part of it, you guess at some other things, but 
at best you come into definite knowledge of only a 
fraction of all that is involved. In some such 
manner we are limited in what we know. There 
is a great unread past and there is a great unwritten 
future, and there is a vast unseen present. All our 
knowledge is circumscribed, and probably all we have 



THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN 8 1 

is faulty. This limitation applies quite as aptly 
to our scientific knowledge as to our theological 
knowing. 

It was my boyish delusion that science answers 
questions. One of my eager expectations was, as 
I read a scientific treatise, that the author is going 
to answer on next page the question he raises on 
this page. When I turned the page I found he 
answered the old question by asking two new ones. 
The chief product of science is more problems. The 
shepherds who slept in the open plains of Mesopo- 
tamia fell asleep studying the stars, and their only 
unanswered questions were as to the distances and 
the simpler movements. The astronomer of to-day 
has a whole book full of unanswered questions as 
to the composition, inhabitants, climate, atmospheric 
conditions, eccentricities, variable movements, proc- 
esses of formation, forms of orbit and position of 
these heavenly bodies, and the plan upon which 
celestial architecture proceeds. I am not an astron- 
omer; if so, I could state a dozen more problems 
that I am not now wise enough to know. 

The same is true of any science. As the terri- 
tory of the known doubles, the territory of the un- 
known multiplies many fold. When you are im- 
prisoned on an island a mile in circumference, there 
is but one mile of border to the unknown world; 
but if your island of the known is enlarged till its 
border is ten miles, then the fringe of the unknown 
is tenfold larger. We know more than the ancients, 



82 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

but we are consciously ignorant of more than ever 
entered their dreams. The printer's case in a 
modern shop has a much larger box to hold interro- 
gation-points than the case of Gutenberg. You 
could have put in a primer all that the students of 
the Middle Ages asked to know, but the fullest 
expositions of science now are largely made up of 
what we are trying to find out. Never was the 
figure more appropriate than now, that we have 
simply walked along the shores and picked up a few 
shells while the unexplored ocean rolls away from 
our feet. 

Every scientific fact leads toward the infinite 
and the unseen in all directions. There is no end 
to the smallest study until the whole realm is cov- 
ered and the entire universe explored. If you 
pluck the smallest flower from its cranny in the 
wall, it refuses to let you go until it leads you out 
to the borders of creation on every side and intro- 
duces you to all its kin of every degree. It holds 
secrets of attraction of gravitation, secrets of chem- 
ical affinity, secrets of vital action, secrets of biology, 
vegetable classification, adaptation to animal wants, 
secrets as to light and color, and step by step it 
will lead you from its modest fragrance and beauty 
until you stand in the presence of Him who paints 
every flower and courts the love of every heart. 

Lest I should arouse unwarranted prejudices 
against this method of putting what I want to say, 
let me assure you right now that I am gladly accept- 



THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN 83 

ing the findings of our scientists, just as fast as 
they are receiving full confirmation. No doubt they 
are in the main right. There is no other way to 
build science except to build on assumptions. Time 
and experience are proving that most of these as- 
sumptions are reliable. I am simply defending re- 
ligious thought against the unfair charge that it is 
built on uncertainties, while science rests on im- 
pregnable rock. My point is that all human knowl- 
edge rests ultimately upon faith, or theory, or un- 
proven hypothesis. This fact, however, does not 
destroy the value of religion or of science. It 
ought to make us careful, but it should not make us 
unbelievers in either field. 

As illustrations of the assumptions which the 
scientist is compelled to make, let me repeat some 
things which have already been mentioned. One of 
the fundamental and universally accepted theories 
of science is that light and heat are one, and that 
they are merely modes of motion. Motion is not a 
substance or entity or something, but is only mat- 
ter moving. Doubtless this explanation is correct. 
But a dozen questions arise at once which this theory 
must answer. Here is a situation which must be 
accounted for. We get light from the sun nearly a 
hundred million miles away. Our atmosphere, 
which is material, extends only fifty miles upward. 
Beyond that is vacancy, vacuum. Since light is only 
matter in motion, on what sort of bridge or wire 
or conductor does this motion propagate itself 



84 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

through these millions of miles of emptiness? If 
our theory of light is going to be saved from wreck, 
we must build that long viaduct. To meet the 
emergency we assume that there is a form of mat- 
ter which had never been dreamed of before, and 
of which there is still no direct evidence, and we 
call it ether, luminiferous ether. We allow it to 
be classed as matter, but we excuse it from all 
the known laws which govern matter; but we do 
this at all hazards and against all scientific rules, 
because we cannot get light and heat from the 
sun without it. I have no doubt that theory is 
here to stay, for a time at least, and it is exceed- 
ingly useful in saving us from utter confusion, but 
it is an assumption. There is far more evidence of 
the existence of a spirit in man than there is of the 
existence of this ether. It is just as hard to prove 
the coming of warmth from the sun to our earth and 
explain how it is done, as to prove the coming of 
God into the hearts which open to receive him. 

Until recently what is known as the atomic theory 
was generally accepted. Take this rough illustra- 
tion. A man is engaged to tear down an old build- 
ing. He removes the roof and attached portions 
and then begins with the walls. He finds it built 
of rectangular bricks. These are the smallest por- 
tions he comes upon. Very naturally he concludes 
that a brick is the unit of structure, and that it is 
the smallest portion of material used. So the 
scientist figured out an imaginary piece of matter, 



THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN 85 

which he named an atom, and this he inferred to 
have been the smallest and the ultimate piece of 
material used in world-building. But now a speck 
of radium threatens to upset this theory, and we 
may be told that a knot of electrical force is the 
ultimate material, and we are not able to say 
whether this is electrical or material. And then we 
are launched out on a wide sea of uncertainty as 
to whether matter is a product of force, or whether 
force inheres in matter, or whether they are dis- 
tinct in essence, but associated in the field of our ob- 
servation. Are they eternal, how do they come to 
act in an intelligible manner, have they always be- 
haved this way, will they continue to do so in- 
definitely ? 

When some of us started to school a little while 
ago we were told with perfect assurance that the 
earth was a bit of boiling matter which the sun 
threw off from its outer surface as it revolved 
rapidly. This accounted for the heat that rages in 
the interior of the earth, and it was explained that 
the crust hardened as the surface became cool by 
radiation. This was scientific gospel. Just now a 
very much approved theory is that the earth was 
built out of frozen material coming together from 
interstellar space, and that the heat which is found 
in the interior of our globe is the result of pressure 
of the superincumbent mass. I am not finding 
fault with these surmises as to how planets are 
made, for I am sure the geologists and astronomers 



86 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

are giving us their latest and best conclusions. 
However, I am only pointing out that even science 
is hedged about and permeated with a considerable 
amount of uncertainty, not to say ignorance, and we 
are not to the place where we can put our theories 
away as complete. No doubt our geologists are 
right in much they teach us, and we are going to 
stay with them, if we can keep up with them, but 
they are not yet insisting that their opinions shall 
be accepted as final. 

It has to be assumed in science that the forces 
which operate now have always been in operation, 
that they have acted with the same vigor — that 
gravitation, affinity, upheaval, erosion, and rainfall 
have continued with no radical variation. It has 
to be taken for granted that no forces have been 
removed along the way and none introduced; that 
the earth has moved essentially in its present path 
and that its changes have been the result of agencies 
now at work. In the face of this, however, there 
are proofs of violent alterations, radical upheavals, 
and catastrophes of wide extent, and changes of 
climate which cannot be explained. There are facts 
which no present theory explains. For example, 
underneath North Pole regions and within arctic 
circles are coal-beds, which must have been de- 
posited when vegetation was rank over the fields 
which are now buried in perpetual ice. Remains of 
elephants and mastodons are discovered embedded 
in great bodies of ice, demonstrating that once the 



THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN 87 

region was a hospitable home for warm-climate 
animals. Some of these animal remains are so well 
preserved that they furnish nourishing food for the 
Eskimo dogs after all these years of cold storage. 
Nor is it possible to explain this change by saying 
that the earth's axis has gradually changed its in- 
clination until the poles, once turned to the sun and 
covered with tropical growth are now robbed of the 
sun's heat. It is claimed that these preserved 
species still retain in their stomachs the undigested 
food of tropical growth, thus proving that the catas- 
trophe which came upon them was as sudden as it 
was violent. 

No one knows better and none admits more 
readily than the scientist himself that all his at- 
tempted demonstrations involve insoluble problems ; 
at least that they border upon the unknown. In 
biology he follows the animal structure back along 
the path it has come, until he reaches the simplest 
form to which he can reduce it. There lies before 
him a cell. This is the ultimate in his analysis. 
By aid of a microscope he looks into and through 
a little cell, a vesicle of watery-like substance, 
crossed it may be with finest lines. There are a hun- 
dred mysteries hidden there from his inquiring eyes. 
Nature knows the secret. If it is the cell of a bird, 
it may be of the variety that wears bright plumage. 
Hidden there may be the singing talents of the 
mocking-bird, the instincts of the migratory bird, 
the fierce nature of the bulldog, the wild ferocity 



88 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

of a lion, the auburn hair of a German, the egotism 
of an American, or it may be there is nothing higher 
in the cell than the low life of a worm. Behind 
that cell stands some sort of intelligence or design 
or fidelity to law which knows all this and brings 
it out without variation of a hair's breadth; but 
no human knowledge can extract the secret. Such 
are some of our limitations. We are at the edge 
of our little island home again, and we look out 
on a wide-reaching ocean which still preserves its 
secrets and shuts us in from complete knowledge. 

Once more I must say a word to protect me from 
the charge of unsettling confidence in the teachings 
of those who study nature. I am supposed to be 
talking to those who have turned their backs upon 
the Bible and the church for the reason, as they 
put it, that theology is made up largely of theories 
that cannot be demonstrated, of doctrines which 
cannot be verified, and of teachings which have no 
assured basis on which to rest. And this claim is 
further emphasized by pointing to science as rest- 
ing upon demonstrations and facts and visible 
proofs for all it asks of us in the way of confidence. 
Such a reason for rejecting religion while accepting 
science is unreasonable. In truth, we are living 
and believing and acting every day in the midst of 
things which are beyond comprehension. There are 
mysteries around us and within us that might well 
strike us with eternal paralysis, provided we are to 
accept nothing which stretches out beyond our com- 



THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN 89 

prehension. Our most useful knowledge is bordered 
by a limitless margin of ignorance. Life's highest 
chapters are wrought out in the midst of what is 
beyond our comprehension. And right along with 
this somewhat depressing view of our limitations 
is the uplifting assurance that the God of nature 
never disappoints us when we follow in faith his 
leading. We trust him as we plant and eat and 
drink and serve, even though we hardly know what 
we do. And in like manner, those who walk after 
him in spirit and trust the grace which is quite as 
well inside our knowledge as the affairs of nature, 
are enriched by their confident trust in him. A little 
knowledge and a little faith go a long way both in 
temporal and in spiritual matters. 

All honor to the patient and careful men who 
study nature. They come right up close to Him who 
made and guides all things in such conformity to 
law that it becomes possible to understand some- 
thing of his way. He counts it no intrusion to in- 
quire about his works. And if these patient stu- 
dents find as great mysteries in the works of his 
hands as we find who study his word, let us not 
reproach each other for our ignorance, neither let 
us refuse to recognize the greatness of him with 
whom is all wisdom and knowledge. 



VII 

THERE IS ONE GOD AND BUT ONE 

This was the claim Jehovah made for himself 
far back in time. Long afterward a man of New 
Testament times said there is none other God but 
one. To that same faith the world is gradually but 
certainly coming. 

About the existence of a superior being or be- 
ings, three views have been held. Atheism says 
there is no god; polytheism says there are many 
gods; our faith says there is one and but one God. 
Christianity has been compelled to meet those who 
affirm that there is no intelligent higher being over 
us, presiding over life and destiny. An atheist 
brushes aside as worthless all the proofs which are 
found of intelligence and power in the world around 
us, and asserts his confidence in the ability of 
matter to have originated itself, or at least to have 
put itself into all the useful, artistic, and manifold 
forms in which we find it. With modesty he ought 
to go only so far as to say that he has not come 
across God in his narrow travels, and to admit that 
there may be corners he has not yet explored. To 
those who are rejoiced to know there is a heavenly 
Father, and that he is near them to do them good, 
90 



THERE IS ONE GOD AND BUT ONE 91 

it seems singular that any one should feel uncom- 
fortable over the thought of living in as large a 
universe as this with God in it also. 

But Christianity has likewise been compelled to 
face those who are of the belief that there are more 
than one superior being in this world of ours. 
Earth and air and sky have been peopled with 
imaginary gods about whom grew up marvelous 
stories of their passions and envies and cruelties 
and vices. Atheism puts us in a world empty of 
morals; polytheism puts us in a world governed 
by immoral powers. Only theism gives us citizen- 
ship in a realm of righteousness. 

At one stage of scientific progress there appears 
to be a disposition to eliminate a personal God from 
the affairs of the physical world. To put it in a 
form least objectionable, I may say that the tendency 
is to put God away back at the beginning, allow 
him to be the possible originator of forces and con- 
ditions which have prevailed since the beginning; 
but all things have been wrought out wholly by im- 
personal and secondary agencies. At best he is 
left a distant spectator of the machinery which he 
put in operation at a dateless period, but which he 
is not allowed to touch now lest he throw the uni- 
verse into disastrous confusion. 

Let me suggest the reading of two psalms that 
by a strange sagacity have been put next to each 
other. The One Hundred and Third Psalm is one 
of the most religious and spiritual passages in the 



92 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

Bible. It is a passage one wants to read in the 
house of worship or in the closet in the secret of 
his presence. It glows with praises of his mercy. 
He is dealing with the soul. Forgiveness and pity 
and tenderness and grace burden every verse in a 
struggle to bring peace to a sinful soul. And then 
as if to meet the objection of materialists, the next 
psalm takes you out of the house of worship and 
leads you away into the material world. 

Modern science has found no simpler, more rea- 
sonable, or more scientific explanation of the phys- 
ical universe than the psalmist gives us here. He 
leads you to the mountains, beside the oceans, 
through the valleys, beside the fields, among the 
trees, into the lair of wild animals, and among the 
clouds. With pious devotion he shows you God's 
trade-mark on every one of these exhibitions of his 
creative skill and power. Lest there should still 
be a skepticism in your heart, he digs down under 
the foundations of the mountains and of the sea, 
and shows you the broad beams of these chambers. 
And then he leads you among the manifold flocks 
and herds of animal life. He shows you the cleft 
where God has made a hiding-place for the conies, 
and the branches for his birds. Up in the clouds he 
points out God's paths for the rain-clouds and in- 
troduces you to the forges of the thunderbolt. 
Yonder are the bounds which he has built in moun- 
tain ranges to keep back the ocean from man's home, 
and you do not fail to note that the largest moun- 



THERE IS ONE GOD AND BUT ONE 93 

tains face the largest seas. In channels he has fur- 
rowed the rivers flow homeward to the ocean, and 
in the hollows he has fashioned the deep waters are 
confined. And then he leads you among the flocks 
and herds which graze in his pastures and rest be- 
side his quiet rivers. Even the young lions take 
their food out of his hand, and the goats hide them- 
selves in the clefts he has fashioned in the rocks. 
Literally millions of animal forms, differing in 
tastes and habits and dependence wait upon him, 
that they may receive their meat in due season. 
There is a claim which goes down to the micro- 
scopic forms which no human eye has beheld, and 
which stretches its scope to the farthest star that 
hangs on the outer walls of the universe. Our 
God filed his claims to this fair and wide dominion. 
He is sole owner. 

Has science any word which invalidates Jehovah's 
claim to the creation and ownership of all things? 
Putting it in other terms, does monotheism comport 
with the best interpretations of modern science? 
Has science any message in support of any one of 
the three theories — that of atheism, that of poly- 
theism, or that of monotheism? 

In an earlier time there were many gods. To 
the simple folk who saw the clouds floating above, 
with no apparent connection with anything on the 
earth, it was perfectly natural to believe that some 
deity had exclusive control of these navies of the 
sky, and so there was a god placed up there. And 



94 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

then the ocean was a thing apart, and as its waves 
rolled their fury back and forth, there was another 
god assigned to the seas. Still another god was in- 
vented for the fields where harvests ripen, another 
for the flaming fires, another as the god of war, 
and so on, to account for these various and separate 
fields of force and action. Gods were multiplied 
beyond number. The facts and forces and fields 
of each department of nature were so distinct from 
every other field that it was difficult to conceive 
them as all under one management. It was still 
more difficult to think of them as uncreated, un- 
governed, and absolutely self -controlled. There was 
not atheism, but polytheism. No one god was 
thought capable of managing these widely separated 
and widely different realms of power. 

But the advancement of science has been largely 
a recognition of the unity of the material world. 
There is no kingdom of the air independent of 
the sea and the earth. There are many rooms in 
this great factory, but there are belts which run 
through these separating walls ; there are shafts of 
power from the basement to the attic. There is one 
power-house which sends the same energy into 
every room and into all the diverse machinery. 
One mind directs all the movements, so that the 
fabric passes from one room to another, from one 
piece of machinery to another, so that when it is 
finished it bears witness to a perfect partnership 
in the various processes. 



THERE IS ONE GOD AND BUT ONE 95 

For illustration, let us take the force of gravita- 
tion. It is that which made Newton's apple fall 
to the ground; it enables you to walk and live on 
the earth; it holds your house in place and fixes 
your furniture where it can serve you; it keeps 
the moon from leaving the companionship of our 
earth, and preserves it from falling on our heads; 
it binds the globe and other planets of our system 
into an orderly family around the sun; it goes be- 
yond that and unites in safe companionship our 
solar system with some larger circle and with some 
far-away center; it ties ten thousand systems into 
a harmonious whole, and the farthest star on the 
confines of creation is preserved in its birthright 
of position. That force operates on every little 
and every large piece of matter according to its 
weight and distance. If that is not true, then the 
entire science of astronomy is a piece of foolishness. 
It serves to weigh your pound of sugar, and it 
binds ten thousand worlds into one great system. 
That one phase of science makes it absolutely im- 
possible to believe in a world divided up into a 
thousand little separate and hostile kingdoms. 
Whoever put one of the stars in place, put all of 
them in place; and the processes of world-making 
that are going on now are directed under that same 
control. It took scientists one hundred years after 
Newton made his discovery, to find what this law 
of gravitation meant. Since then they have used 
it to find new heavenly bodies ; by it they have fore- 



$6 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

told the coming and the paths of comets; by its 
help they have weighed the stars and measured their 
distances from us. Because the heavens are under 
one control, there can be an astronomy. 

Another evidence of the unity of all created 
things is found in the practical identity of the 
material out of which suns and planets are com- 
posed. The spectroscope is a wonderful invention. 
For you and me it is enough just now to know that 
by using a prism and letting the light from any 
radiant body fall through the prism, the rays of 
light will be separated. And then, what is most 
wonderful, the scientist can tell what chemical ele- 
ment is furnishing that light. The chemist can 
take a stone into his laboratory and apply chem- 
ical tests and discover what it is composed of. Or, 
he can get the rays from an incandescent stone in 
a star and tell what it is composed of. The spectro- 
scope has demonstrated that all the stars and 
planets are made up of essentially the same material, 
though not always in the same proportion. Thus, 
not only are all the heavenly bodies governed by 
the same law of gravitation, but they are made out 
of the same material. Did you ever see the dresses 
of two ladies made of the same weave? Then you 
know what this fact of science means. Not only is 
the same material used, but when the mass is 
fashioned into a sun or planet or system, the same 
pattern is used, even if the two stars are tens of 
billions of miles distant from each other. They 



THERE IS ONE GOD AND BUT ONE i)J 

are all made in the same shop, out of the same 
material, fashioned in the same way, and weighed 
in the same scales. 

If it were necessary we could pursue the identi- 
ties still further, with the same result. Let us take 
the matter of light and simply file its claim in a 
few words. The law of light which governs your 
electric bulb in its service to you is the same law 
which brings to your eye the image of a star a 
million miles away. Yes, there are stars which you 
may look upon to-day that may have been blotted 
out ten thousand years ago, and the news of the 
catastrophe has not arrived. General Jackson 
fought the battle of New Orleans after peace had 
been made, but the information had not come to 
him, and he went on fighting. This light falling so 
gently upon the tender retina of your eye has made 
a miraculous journey to reach you. But it has 
come solely because the unseen ether which rests 
softly upon your eye continues in an unbroken 
stretch, a perfect sea of ether right up to that star, 
and there is not a space of one-thousandth part of 
an inch in all the millions of miles where there is 
the least divide. A little ripple like that made when 
you drop a stone in water started years ago, and 
with unfailing fidelity it has kept coming; it did 
not have to pass through an enemy's country; it 
had to pay no toll to a foe on the route; it did not 
have to transform its message or slip through by 
cunning device. From start to terminus it has been 

G 



98 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

under one management, moving in one medium, and 
it comes with its message unchanged. 

Thus we have found certain fixed and unalterable 
forces prevailing near and far in the physical world. 
The force which holds planets in their places, which 
keeps the heavenly bodies in a happy family rela- 
tion, which prevents the crash of worlds in a mo- 
ment's time, and which makes possible the change 
of seasons and the continuance of life, this mys- 
terious force that no science can begin to explain, 
is in exercise everywhere. It is a unifying prin- 
ciple. It is like a ledge of rock running under- 
neath a continent; and while the surface may be 
made up of hills and valleys, cities and country dis- 
tricts — still they all rest alike on this basal support. 
It is a bit like the steam-engine down in the base- 
ment, which sends out its energy through the whole 
factory. It is like the stability of a great build- 
ing, which keeps the walls and rooms and floors 
and foundations from falling apart and saves the 
structure from wreck. 

We have seen that Sirius is made out of the 
same component parts that form our earth. Its ele- 
ments and their arrangement into spherical shape 
and motion are the same as prevail here. And 
so of all heavenly bodies. And we have found 
that these bodies, no matter how widely removed 
from each other, are all immersed in a common sea 
of ether, which reaches and touches them all and 
furnishes communication among them by means of 



THERE IS ONE GOD AND BUT ONE 99 

light. These bodies are as so many great cities 
linked together by a common system of railroads and 
telegraph or steamship lines. 

Surely I need not stop now to insist upon what 
this all means when we come to the three problems 
which I named at the opening of this discourse. A 
plurality of gods cannot be an admission of science. 
There may have been a time when nature, as then 
understood, had little to say concerning the origin 
and control of mundane and stellar affairs. As 
long as nature was looked upon as an aggregation 
of different spheres, a sort of conjunction of realms 
all unlike each other, it may have been easy to put 
a god in charge of each department. Polytheism 
is common to an unscientific age. But when it has 
been demonstrated that the universe is indeed a 
unit, as the word implies, then we must have a 
conception of the origin and management which is 
in harmony with that unity. Every step of science 
has been toward a harmonious and compact and 
mutually helpful world. Because the universe is 
one, there cannot be many makers. Because it is 
an intelligible universe, it must have had an intel- 
ligent Maker. 

It seems hardly necessary to pursue this line of 
demonstration further. However, science teaches 
us the same plain lesson if we confine our inves- 
tigations to mundane affairs. It is not a necessity 
that we should stay among the stars to find proofs 
that the wisdom which made one part of the mate- 



IOO SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

rial world made also every other part. The unity of 
which we have been speaking extends to the small 
affairs right about us. 

It was not in the dreams of the ancients that 
light and heat were one and the same. True, it 
was common to see a wire or iron when put in 
certain connections pass through both stages. First 
it gave out warmth, even to burning the hand; and 
then when the application of heat was made more 
vigorous, the dull iron glowed with red and white. 
It took thousands of years for us to learn that heat 
was motion traveling so many miles an hour, and 
that when the speed is increased, the same motion 
becomes light. Probably we have yet to learn how 
close is the likeness of identity between light and 
electricity; at least we have found that electricity 
is also a motion. Sound comes under a separate list 
in some respects, and yet it is also motion. Whether 
we are going to find out that light and heat and 
electricity and chemical affinity are all in close 
partnership or not, we have found that nature can 
do a thousand things with the same material, and 
can conduct a myriad of operations with one force. 

Whatever one may think of the various state- 
ments of the theory of evolution, there is no ques- 
tion but that there are at best only a few general 
patterns by which animal bodies are fashioned. 
Nature has but one general set of working plans 
for building planetary and solar systems, and we 
are beginning to see that she has very few patterns 



THERE IS ONE GOD AND BUT ONE IOI 

in which she molds animal forms. The structure 
begins with a cell, which in chemical material and 
in organized form is identical for all prospective 
varieties. As the organization proceeds differentia- 
tions take place, but according to a few stock pat- 
terns. One is almost ready to say that divine genius 
for invention is limited, and that nature's economy 
in this respect is barely above the rank of poverty. 
The constant wonder is that she has so few and 
simple outlines with which to start, and then that 
with so little of variety in the beginnings she can 
finish up with such an overwhelming collection of 
dissimilar structures. There may be five thousand 
varieties of birds; but, after all, there is but one 
simple pattern for bird-making. 

If a skilful and careful scientist had set out to 
make this vast and variegated universe, with its 
bewildering diversities in mineral and vegetable and 
animal structures, he would not have made his 
first mixture of material until he was provided 
with a few millions of elements to assure him of 
sufficiency in the variety demanded of him. Sixty 
or seventy such elements would have seemed to 
him all too meager a stock out of which to produce 
this myriad-formed collection of organized struc- 
ture. And careful students are wondering now 
if there are sixty or seventy of these elements, as 
we have been counting them, or whether, after all, 
we have not overestimated the divine supply of re- 
sources, and therefore put too small a value on 



102 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

the divine ability to fashion and combine. The 
factor of matter in the material universe has been 
overworked by our scientists, while the factor of 
intelligent design has been put at too low a per- 
centage. 

But we cannot pursue this deeply interesting 
study longer. Science has led us carefully along 
the path of investigation, until a wise and resource- 
ful God is a logical necessity. The eternity of 
matter is more unthinkable than the eternity of 
spirit. Nothing can possibly account for what we 
find but an intelligent, creative, and controlling 
Power. Science is merely thinking over again the 
thoughts that are expressed in nature. If one finds 
a piece of paper in the road and, on examination, 
discovers that it is written over with characters 
which he can decipher, and further that these char- 
acters contain thoughts which he can comprehend, 
then there is but one conclusion to which he must 
come. A mind kindred to his own did this thinking 
some time ago, and then expressed it in these let- 
ters. What he reads out of them was first written 
in them. That a mind takes them in is proof that a 
mind gave them out. Nor does it at all weaken 
this conclusion to answer that the material world 
has grown up into its present shape through long 
processes. In such case there is not only still the 
indubitable proof of intelligence, but there is the 
further increasing proof, in the long-sustained and 
systematic perseverance of an intelligent plan. 



THERE IS ONE GOD AND BUT ONE IO3 

It will be noticed that I have not touched upon the 
great moral evidences which are found scattered 
throughout the material world. Since man is both 
physical and spiritual, he is mixed up with the af- 
fairs of both kingdoms. There is a field of most 
interesting and profitable study here, in tracing how 
harmonious is his progress in physical matters and 
his simultaneous progress in spiritual attainments. 
Though he is a citizen of two worlds, his dual cit- 
izenship is one harmonious whole. He is under the 
same tutelage and discipline in both. The God of 
his body is likewise the God of his soul. 

Theism is the inevitable conclusion of a right- 
minded scientist. I know it can be pointed out that 
a few scientists are materialists. Admitting most 
that I have been saying, they dismiss the idea of a 
personal God, and ask us to fall down and worship 
an impersonal, unthinking, unfeeling, and purpose- 
less universe. Such exhortation will never win the 
world to hope and virtue. When a soul cries out 
in the dark, it waits to hear an answering voice that 
speaks its own tongue. 

The letter which came to me in the lonely days 
of college life was filled with a mother's thought 
and love; when vacation came satisfaction was 
reached only in going back home and looking into 
her face and hearing her voice. From what we 
read of our Father's mind written in his two letters, 
nature and the Bible, we want to know him more 
fully and stand before him in peace. 



VIII 

THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES 

Plant life has built its empire upon the material. 
It employs the forces of gravitation and light and 
heat and chemical affinity in its architectural struc- 
tures, and makes its body out of dull matter. With 
that newer force which science has sought in vain 
to discover, it lifts up the sand and soil, the carbon 
and hydrogen and oxygen, and transforms them 
into combinations which inorganic chemistry knows 
nothing about. It is the advent of a higher king- 
dom into a lower, and what was dead matter is born 
from above into new beauty and meaning. In its 
class this mystery is equal to that of the spiritual 
birth which confused Nicodemus, and has furnished 
problems for theologian and psychologist. Some 
of the laws of the lower are still in force over this 
regenerate matter, and yet there are so many things 
entirely new that tests and definitions and explana- 
tions which serve in one sphere cannot be depended 
on in the other. If there are mysteries in the labo- 
ratory in lifeless substances, we need not be 
astounded to find still more of the insoluble when 
we have to deal in addition with the activities of the 
unknown force which we try to describe as vital. 
104 



THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES IC>5 

Jesus laid claim to the vegetable world as the 
creation of his hand and as the text-book for his 
richest instruction. Possibly he was walking with 
his followers along the path through a vineyard, 
troubled in heart because he could not bring them to 
understand that their new faith must be fixed in 
him, and that their usefulness to the world de- 
pended on their living connection with him. In a 
few words he drew the outline of this comparison. 
God the Father occupies the place of husbandman ; 
Jesus, in the work of redemption, is the vine it- 
self; disciples are the limbs and branches and twigs. 
The humanity of the Master is made more conspicu- 
ous in the lesson than his divinity. His lesson is 
directed to the branches, on the ground that their 
value to the husbandman is wholly a question of 
their relation to the vine. The work of man is to 
believe on him whom the Father has sent. We 
may not press these likenesses beyond the rank of 
illustrations, but they are more than incidental 
similarities, because they are creations of the same 
hand. Since they are illustrations, they are not 
identities ; but because this comparison is taken from 
one of our Father's patterns, and because Jesus 
called attention to points of contact, we may rever- 
ently follow his suggestion. 

A bit of exegesis may aid us to a better under- 
standing of what is taught, and at the same time 
bring out more clearly the lines of beauty. There 
are four different words in the Greek New Testa- 



106 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

ment which are alike translated into English by the 
word " branch." Two of them we may dismiss 
just now, for they do not concern this study. The 
other two are different in form, but are from the 
same root, and may be considered but different 
forms of the same word. One of them is klados, 
and the other is kleema. For purposes of ety- 
mological study we may consider the two as but one, 
since they have the same origin and apparently the 
same significance. Under ordinary circumstances 
we might be justified here in assuming that Jesus 
is referring to the limb which grows out of a tree 
or vine, and which is filling the only place it has 
ever occupied or may ever occupy. But when we 
note that Jesus confined himself to one word, and 
further that this is not the word which classic 
Greek would likely use for the limb of a vine, we 
are justified in making a closer inspection. 

There is a verb quite familiar to readers of classic 
Greek, which means to break. In the four Gospels 
it occurs fourteen times where Jesus is said to have 
broken bread. This is its invariable and easy sig- 
nificance generally. Its form is klao, or klazo, these 
two forms being used indifferently. After the law 
observed in forming many words in that language, 
a noun was formed from the verb which expresses 
the result of the action in the verb. These are 
called verbal nouns, and are to be met in every 
tongue. The result of a breaking is a broken piece, 
a fragment. The piece which is broken from the 



THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES IO7 

loaf is a klados or a kleema, At first sight there 
does not seem to be any connection whatever be- 
tween such a verb and the branches of a tree, and it 
is because there is no original kinship between the 
word and its use here, that the significance is im- 
portant. 

Science was early in the orchards and the vine- 
yard. Beginning how far back no one can tell, the 
vine-dresser knew how to graft buds and branches 
and roots of one plant into another and secure a 
more valuable fruit. By usage the common word to 
designate a scion or cutting or graft was this word 
which we have been examining. The bud or branch 
which had been severed from its original vine was 
now only a fragment, a piece resulting from a sever- 
ance, it was a kleema. We do not literally break 
off the bud or branch we are going to graft, but 
sever it with a knife, and we call it a cutting, which 
is exactly what the Greeks did. Where they use 
the word which means to break, we use the word 
to cut. And just as our word cutting has lost its 
generic scope and has come to be applied only to 
one kind of cutting, so it appears that in Greek the 
average hearer would think of a branch which had 
been obtained for purposes of grafting. Paul em- 
ployed the same figure when he argues the problem 
of bringing Gentiles into the kingdom. He says in 
substance that the Jews were the natural branches 
growing on the Hebrew stock. But because of 
their unfruitfulness or to give room for purposes 



108 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

of grace, some of these natural branches were 
broken off, and other branches, severed from a wild 
olive tree, were brought and grafted into the king- 
dom of promise. Not only does the apostle em- 
ploy the same figure Jesus had in mind, but he 
uses exactly the same word. Paul carries the 
imagery a bit farther than Jesus, since he points 
to the removal of the natural branch to give room 
for the cutting. 

To one who delights in analogies and who can 
follow them even where the trail is dim, this lesson 
in the vineyard is full of further interest, and it 
may help to make understandable the facts of re- 
generation. One of the first processes of grafting 
is the severance of the cutting from its old support, 
and reducing it practically to a state of death, for 
it is separated from every possible source of nutri- 
ment. Dead to the old, it waits to be made alive 
to the new. In the process of grafting into the new, 
there is a work that is formal and another part 
that is vital. The incision into the vine, the inser- 
tion of the graft, the wrapping and bandage and all 
the trimming for neatness of surgical taste, these 
are but clumsy doings. But there is hope that be- 
neath the covering of bandage and bark a secret 
and silent process takes place, in which the life of 
the vine, full and fresh, flows out into the veins of 
the branch to give it a full supply of life. The 
ceremonial forms of inserting and binding and 
trimming may be accomplished with apparent per- 



THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES IO9 

fection, and yet nothing come of it all. There 
must take place the establishment of the vine's life 
in the branch, and growth must follow. For some 
days it is not possible to detect whether the graft- 
ing is a success, but in a little while the decision is 
proclaimed in the putting forth of leaves and fruits 
on the branch. There is conclusive proof of suc- 
cess in the productive power of the branch. With- 
out the vine fruit-bearing is out of the question. 
The husbandman in a real vineyard watches for 
these signs of life, and when they are discovered 
he continues his care by trimming and training. He 
seeks that the life which is begun may be increased 
to the multiplying of fruit. If, on the other hand, 
the branch does not produce bud and leaf and 
fruit, the proof is conclusive that the formal at- 
tachment was only mechanical, and hence worth- 
less. As the words of Jesus show, the old-time hus- 
bandman then cut away the engrafted branch and 
destroyed it. The undertaking was a failure. The 
parable follows strictly the entire proceeding, and 
gives the sequence of successful grafting and the 
sequence of defeat. 

Two troublesome questions have been raised by 
a somewhat literal and misguided interpretation of 
this parable. It has seemed to some that Jesus 
teaches, at least by implication, that the branch is a 
natural outgrowth of the vine, and that if the rela- 
tion of a soul to salvation is mirrored in the parable, 
then the teaching plainly is that children are born 



110 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

and grow up members of the body of Christ. At 
any rate, such a theology has found place in familiar 
and ancient creeds. It was taught that especially 
the children of believing parents are heirs of the 
kingdom, are entitled to full recognition as Chris- 
tians because they are members of religious families 
and supposably members of the church. In later 
developments, this birthright was supposed to ex- 
tend to all infants, and there was accorded to them 
the status of church-membership. A more modern 
doctrine of the same final import is that religion is 
the natural inheritance of a human being. The 
normal child is born with religion as one of its 
endowments, and there is nothing more or less to 
be done for it than a cultivation of that religious 
talent, just as we cultivate inherited tastes and 
powers of conscience. 

For myself I hold essentially to the older view 
that Jesus spoke to Nicodemus a truth of race-wide 
application. He was not limiting himself to either 
Jews or Gentiles when he demanded a new birth 
for every human heart. Salvation is not the result 
of birth of the flesh, it does not come as the fruit- 
age of the flesh, it is not produced by church-mem- 
bership or obedience to external ordinances; it is 
spiritual, it is from above, it is divine. The safety 
of unconscious infancy is a different problem, and 
seems to be left entirely in the hands of our Sa- 
viour, and is not dwelt upon in setting forth the 
way of life for adults. Certainly this parable we 



THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES III 

are studying creates no problem of this sort; but, 
on the contrary, it teaches by analogy that the graft- 
ing of a wild branch into a domesticated vine is 
the product, not of unaided nature, but of a benefi- 
cent purpose and by a higher power. It seems to 
me impossible that Jesus should have taken as his 
figure the one plant which was peculiarly the prod- 
uct of grafting; that he should have used that par- 
ticular word when there were other words which he 
could better have used unless he had intended the 
special meaning that this word carried; and finally, 
the application of his parable is truer to nature 
under the meaning we have found in it than if he 
had spoken of the ordinary branch. 

There is still another difficulty which some sys- 
tems of theology have found in the ordinary inter- 
pretation of this parable. On the face of the para- 
ble it would seem that a living branch which had 
sprung out of the vine and had spent all its life 
there may reach a stage of unfruitfulness which 
brings upon it condemnation and destruction. The 
doctrine of falling from grace is held by many ex- 
cellent and intelligent believers. I do not care to 
enter here upon the discussion of that question. 
There are numerous warnings to Christians against 
falling into sins which harm and hinder. There is 
no definite line drawn, up to which one may sin and 
retain place in the pale of salvation, but beyond 
which the title to everlasting life is withdrawn. 
There may be little profit in debating all these 



112 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

knotty problems which present themselves in the- 
ology just as similar problems obstruct the path of 
a scientist. Nevertheless, I venture the caution that 
this parable, when interpreted on principles of sound 
exegesis, does not touch the question of the final 
perseverance of saints. 

At least it does not teach that those who are 
abiding in Christ and drawing their life from him 
may be stripped of their new birth and sent back 
into death. The fire kindled yonder back of the 
vineyard is not fed in this parable from the branches 
which have flourished and dwelt securely in the vines 
where they were created, but they are fed by the 
twigs or branches which have been handled by the 
nurseryman, which have been taken from the old 
setting and placed in the new, which were nursed 
with hopeful care that they would become part of the 
vine. Adopting the corresponding religious terms, 
we may say that they were touched by saving in- 
fluences, they broke away from sinful environment, 
they suffered a sort of separation from the world, 
and gave some evidence of a spiritual revolution. 
Possibly they made public profession of faith and 
went so far as to submit to baptism and seek church- 
membership. All of this is commendable, unless 
this is all. There remains the demand of the Great 
Teacher, " Ye must be born again." Inside the 
church is a perilous place for one who has no real 
and living connection with Christ, especially is it 
perilous in a time when there is a prevalent belief 



THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES 113 

that ceremonies and rites and professions and or- 
ganizations are sufficient to carry the soul up to God. 

Aside from these suggestions which the parable 
seems to me to make more or less plainly, there are 
great lessons lying upon the surface of this won- 
derful picture. The purpose of our Saviour is that 
we should bear fruit. He is never satisfied with 
leaves. Barrenness called out one of the very few 
displays of his anger in miraculous demonstration. 
The fig tree was not living up to its profession and 
opportunity. Judged by the law of life laid down in 
the New Testament and by the facts of their living, 
not half of us could maintain in an earthly court of 
justice our claim to church-membership. Jesus in 
this parable, intentionally or not, presents a grada- 
tion in his requirements. He first declares that he 
expects fruit; then he advances and lays claim to 
much fruit; and finally he puts on the unbounded 
requirement for more fruit. For this a vineyard 
is planted, and for this souls are brought into 
churches and fields of service. The all-seeing Eye 
may know whether indeed all of us are genuinely 
converted or not, but to human eyes there is but 
one evidence, and that is the fruitage of life. 

There are scores of lessons ripening on every leaf 
and festooning every twig of orchard and forest and 
field. If cautious in our endeavor, we may linger 
after the Saviour is through speaking, and under 
warrant of his example, we may look for further 
tuition. The vineyard is a prepared place. Best 

H 



114 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

conditions possible are provided for the growth of 
the vines. A sort of church-membership, or church- 
fellowship, is laid out to make the plant certain of 
a fair chance. The field lies on the right hillside to 
get best service of sunshine and shower and drain- 
age. The soil is enriched and stirred. A pro- 
tecting fence or wall insures defense from without. 
Any well-intentioned and well-behaved vine would 
much rather be located there than in the wild woods. 
I have gathered grapes in the woods, but the vines 
were far apart, they were hampered in their growth, 
they took hard chances against their foes and the 
forest fires; too often their ripened fruit rotted 
where it ripened, because it was not accessible, and 
it was never so abundant as it ought to have been. 
There is poor prospect for a vine that undertakes to 
despise the conditions for largest fruitfulness, and 
despises the closer companionship of other vines of 
its class. There is no need, and I have no disposi- 
tion, to abuse those who are trying to live Christian 
lives in disregard of the organization and fellow- 
ship and cooperation which the New Testament 
provides for. Even though churches are not what 
they ought to be, and granted that they have neg- 
lected some of the functions assigned them, they 
are the families of God's children, they are the 
working forces of his kingdom, and they are the 
subjects of his promises. As yet there has been 
found no horticultural chemistry which will turn 
the thorn bushes of the wilds into good fruit trees, 



THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES 115 

nor has there been found a way for the good fruit 
tree to hold its own and do its best located in the 
uncultivated jungles. 

In my boyhood I well recall a few miles from my 
home a little clearing of two acres on top of a 
wooded ridge. At some time a pioneer had come 
there and built a cabin and cleared out the begin- 
ning of a farm. Here was a mound of stone and 
earth where the house had stood. Its walls were 
gone, and with childish fancy I have stopped there 
in the deep solitude and repeopled the home from 
my fancy. It was the home-place of pilgrims, the 
camping-place of immortals; here they had been 
happy or unhappy. But the children no longer 
played at the door; no longer was it a place of 
prayer and domestic love. Stretching out from it 
was this space of two or more acres, and around 
this the trees stood in close line as sentinels to mark 
the borders of their unspoiled domain. Fences were 
all gone. Here, near where the corner of the house 
had stood, there was a ragged, crooked, dwarfed 
peach tree. Maybe by accident the stone had been 
dropped by careless hands, but nature is not exact- 
ing as to who shall do the planting, though she is 
unrelenting as to the character of seed planted. 

This tree outlasted walls and foundations, and 
stood deserted by all the others that had been in 
the procession of life which moved along this road. 
Every year when it came time for peach trees to 
bloom, and when all the hills about were decorated 



Il6 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

with the white-and-pink blossom, each tree holding 
aloft the trade-mark of its clan, this poor, forsaken 
tree sent out its banner. It held up a bloom here 
and there, trying to hide its poverty by shrewd dis- 
tribution, as the housewife arranges her furniture 
for better appearance. It was a poor, pitiful effort 
on the part of the tree. But it had a life in it that 
claimed its kinship with every peach tree in the 
world. It never consented to betray its God or its 
kindred. It stood up to be counted when the census 
was taken. It wore its few and scattered colors on 
rally day, but there was not much enthusiasm. But 
more pathetic still was the little tree's effort to bear 
a harvest. If the season was entirely favorable, a 
few peaches appeared here and there. They were 
of the right variety. As a church-member, the tree 
was loyal. There was no hypocrisy in its behavior. 
It took no celestial microscope to classify it. No 
soft examination was required to get its name on 
the list. But these few knotty peaches never 
amounted to much. Insects preyed upon them. 
The hard ground doomed them to littleness. A 
poor soil withheld material. Horses and cows fed 
on the lower limbs and taxed vitality. Last of all, 
this unguarded, unclaimed fruit was the property 
of the first bunch of boys who, in their Sunday 
rovings, came that way. Yes, this is a peach tree, 
but what is the use? The lack of fruit is the for- 
feiture of life. 
If we were to cross the fence that surrounds 



THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES 11/ 

this vineyard, the forest beyond would be found 
full of sermons. The tree that is bent in its first 
years never quite recovers. The nature with which 
a tree begins it must carry to the end. There is no 
regeneration for the forest, except as seen in the 
parable with which we started this study. Inside 
the tree is a life, and that life shapes leaf and flower 
and fruit. " The life is more than meat, and the 
body is more than raiment." Some trees are useful 
for the fruit they bear while they live, others are 
valuable for the timber they leave when they die. 
Not all fruits are equally delicious, but each in its 
place is useful. There is no debating society in the 
grove among the trees over their respective worth to 
the world. Not often is a crooked tree useful, 
though occasionally it is the crooked form that is 
prized. Many a tender sapling has been forced out 
of shape into perpetual crookedness by the over- 
shadowing presence of some worthless tree — trie 
curse of a strong life falling in silent force upon 
tenderness to its permanent hurt. 

These silent sermons are delivered every day 
and every hour for those who love to commune with 
nature and worship out in these first temples. 
Whether we walk in the forest in wintertime, when 
our own spiritual life is in its decline; or whether 
we come out as the soul is in tune with all the open- 
ing joys of springtime; or whether we are in the 
nidst of splendid achievements for God and hu- 
manity, and therefore in touch with nature's sum- 



Il8 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

mertime ; or finally, if with coming age we are ripen- 
ing for the home up yonder and are beside the 
earthly reapers gathering their rich harvests, in 
whatever season of the year or in whatever mood 
of heart we come, nature is our mirror, our teacher, 
and our guide. If he can make these matchless 
forms and beauties and utilities out of common dirt, 
what may we hope for ourselves and others in the 
achievements of that higher material and that holier 
atmosphere? Our relation to Jesus is not official 
and formal ; it is personal and vital. Each soul is, in 
this parable, a branch. The connection is with 
Christ directly, and not through intermediaries. 
Upon this indwelling depends the assurances of 
faith and fruitfulness in any department of the 
Master's service. 



IX 

LIFE AFTER DEATH 

An ancient writer, referring to what we call 
death, said : " Then shall the dust return to the earth 
as it was : and the spirit shall return unto God who 
gave it." The simplicity and clearness of this sen- 
tence is worthy of notice. There is no straining of 
words, no reach after large terms, no impressive or 
rhetorical arrangement. Man's origin, nature, and 
destiny are set forth mostly in monosyllables. The 
statement is likewise scientific. -A man is composed 
of two distinct parts. His body is made up of 
earthly material, and when it has fulfilled its pur- 
pose it will go back to the earth. Dwelling in this 
body and associated with it in a mysterious partner- 
ship is his spirit. It is not material, and therefore it 
will not go back to the earth. God gave it. From 
him it came, and when its mission here is com- 
pleted it will go back to its home. 

Those of us who believe the Bible may not need 
to go elsewhere for a confirmation of our hope to 
live on when this life is over. The written promises 
are our sufficient assurance. Probably all men are 
endowed with this pleasing hope. It is divinely 
implanted, and we can readily believe that he who 

119 



120 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

fitted the lungs and the air to each other and the 
eye to the light has also made a heaven to answer 
our deepest longing. But just now we are not going 
to appeal to the universal faith nor yet to the pledges 
of Scripture. We are going to look at what we can 
see and learn around us and note if nature has any 
processes which in any way hint at the existence of 
immortal spirit. In our present study spirit, resur- 
rection, and immortality are inseparably connected. 
Any one implies the other two. 

The theologian and the scientist are met at an 
open grave. Between them stands a mourner, to 
whom this question is just now of deepest interest. 
A problem which touched him lightly at other times 
weighs his heart down. With irresistible pleading 
he looks up to these two men and asks for the best 
word they can give him. His is not an idle of 
curious inquiry. His heart is throbbing to find 
anchorage. Have they both an answer? Do their 
answers agree or do they contradict each other? 
Will both their answers or either of them bring 
peace ? You know what the theologian will say, for 
you have heard him repeatedly on just such occa- 
sions. We are especially anxious to hear what the 
scientist can say. He is a patient and reliable in- 
vestigator; he has brought us many wonderful dis- 
coveries ; he is a man of sympathetic soul. He will 
be true to his scientific profession, and he will be 
tender toward the mourner. He will not speak- 
without warrant. 



LIFE AFTER DEATH 121 

In the first place, he will tell us that he has no 
definite knowledge on that point. His business is 
to deal with material objects and forces. If there 
is such a thing as spirit, it does not come within the 
field of his investigation. His instruments of test- 
ing are a thermometer, a pair of scales, a test- 
tube, a telescope, a microscope, a yardstick, a steam- 
gauge. Spirit does not and cannot respond to any 
of these appliances. He can take a ray of light and 
analyze it. He can weigh the rocks and discover 
a chemical element in a compound, but there is no 
way for him to imprison a spirit in his laboratory 
and compel it to yield its secrets. 

We easily understand what he means. His tele- 
scope does not give him temperature, his scales do 
not reveal distant stars, nor his barometer measure 
the strength of chemical affinity. An instrument 
of examination is worthless for any test except for 
the particular one for which it was made. This is 
what the scientist means when he assures us that 
he has never discovered spirit nor immortality in his 
experiments. 

But we are willing to have him go farther and 
say that his inability to discover spirit is not even 
one step toward the conclusion that there is no 
spirit. Indeed, his whole system of scientific fact 
and theory is based upon assumptions which he can- 
not directly verify. He is confident that electricity 
exists, but he has never been able to set it out by 
itself and know it. Its effects are abundant and 



122 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

abundantly evident, but he has never come in sight 
of it. He believes there is a force called gravita- 
tion, which operates near and far on all bodies and 
according to mathematical precision, but he has 
never been any nearer this force than he has to 
spirit. Passing from unseen forces to matter itself, 
he holds that there is a substance, a form of matter, 
which reaches all the way from the sun to the earth, 
and he calls it luminiferous ether. There is no evi- 
dence that such a thing exists except its effects. 
The universally accepted theory of light must as- 
sume such a medium, or the whole theory of light 
falls to the ground. And yet there is no doubt in 
the minds of any of us as to the existence of elec- 
tricity and gravitation and ether. These we know 
about, just as we know about spirit. And thus our 
scientist leaves us large room for faith in the 
immaterial and the immortal. The limits of his 
knowledge are not to be taken as the limit of 
what is possible or real. 

But we are anxious for him to tell us whether 
there is anything in all the reach of his studies which 
carries a bit of likeness to what we are taught in 
the Bible concerning the life beyond. If nature does 
not teach the impossibility of a future life, has it 
chapters and lines and pictures which would in any 
wise suggest continuance, or resurrection, or a 
change in life without destruction? Is there a pat- 
tern shown us in the Mount, according to which we 
may shape pictures of our imperishable longing? 



LIFE AFTER DEATH I 23 

Do the footprints of our God across the face of the 
earth lead toward heaven? A hint from God is 
worth more than all the guesses or doubts of men, 
whether that hint is given in word or symbol. 

Suppose it is your first full and conscious day on 
earth. There has not been a moment's break in 
the warming, blessed sunshine. Through the long 
hours you have come to take this light as a matter 
of course, and not once has a suggestion arisen that 
it will come to an end. You have no conception of 
what darkness is. But at length shadows grow 
deeper, a haze settles on the scene, and night comes. 
You are not sure whether light has gone out or only 
your sight has failed. Is it total blindness that has 
come to you, or is it extinction of the sun, or is 
it both? You have reached a new passage in life, 
you have come to the end of a chapter. Maybe this 
is the last. Vain is the wish for the sun's return. 
There is no profit in straining the eyes and turning 
a sightless face toward the west. But in a few 
hours the east grows radiant, and in good time the 
same sun comes up and gives another day as bright 
as the one you mourned. Nature's power and plan 
are not defeated. 

Lengthen your experience, and suppose you have 
started life in the springtime, and you have known 
nothing but the warmth and growth of summer. 
Surely this is a world of perpetual life and bloom 
and fruitage. And then one morning there is a 
chill wind from the north. Then follows an un- 



124 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

heard-of something, a biting frost. The flowers 
wither and fall, the fields turn brown and dead. 
Trees lose their foliage. Death settles over all the 
scene. Has the sun lost its path through the 
heavens, was it all in vain, is life to be buried ever- 
more in ice and snow? Your experience has no 
answer to give. Hope finds no friends. But win- 
ter, though longer than the night which gave you 
trouble, comes at length to its close. The same sun 
swings back in its course. The same trees put out 
leaves, the same carpet spreads itself over the 
meadows. Once more flowers bloom and fruits 
ripen. There was change, there was alternation, 
but identity remained, an unbroken plan was carried 
through the apparent disaster, and the seasons con- 
tinue. 

When loving parental care saw the little children 
fall asleep that first night of human occupation of 
the house our Father provided for us, there must 
have been a dread of what might follow. They 
had seen no sleeper awake; they were untutored 
as to what sleep is. Did they watch and weep that 
first long night, asking if love is cheated out of its 
object? There is a vivid picture of death which 
came soon into the circle of human experience. We 
may not know what the heart could make out of 
such a trial ; the story is unwritten, but it had some 
of the elements of anxiety and uncertainty that 
gather around death. But the waiting was not in 
vain. That strange spell passed away soon, and the 



LIFE AFTER DEATH I 25 

life which had slipped off for a bit of quiet, a sort 
of home-going to the unseen or a love visit, re- 
turned brighter and fresher than it went. Weeping, 
which endured for a night, gave place to joy in the 
morning. It was not the end, it was part of life's 
divine program. Night, winter, and sleep are divine 
appointments, not disappointments. 

The tree which is to succeed the one now full of 
fruit must go down through a seemingly lifeless 
seed and must be buried in order to live again. 
The dull worm that has no thought for itself and 
no employment perishes into a butterfly and a 
weaver of silken threads for raiment of kings. 

Why should it, in a world such as this, be thought 
incredible that God should raise the dead, or that 
those who go out from us are going to wake up in 
a new day, or grow on in a new springtime ? Nature 
has no potion which brings on eternal sleep. All 
elsewhere death is but the gate to wider and fuller 
life. It is a marvel that we live at all ; once living, 
the marvel would be that we should ever cease to 
live. 

Let us linger yet longer with this interesting man 
and his yet more interesting studies of nature. You 
have not failed to notice that there has been a 
marked change in the class of studies pursued by 
the scientists. The ancients studied the wider move- 
ments of the stars, and came to some sensible and to 
some foolish conclusions. They could see the rivers 
and the mountains and the larger objects of nature. 



126 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

But they went little beyond the coarser objects of 
study. But modern scientists are going deeper. 
They discover and measure the force of chemical 
affinity. They find the law of gravity, and they 
describe and measure its influence through stellar 
space. They trace the current of electricity and 
calculate its power to carry messages, draw trains, 
and drive machinery. 

In other words, they are not dealing with matter 
in the rough, but with the concealed, invisible, in- 
tangible forces and relations of matter. It is the 
X-ray, or the minute germ, or the life-cell, or the 
thing we call life itself, that they are studying. 
Out there a little way lies the immaterial, spiritual 
world with which our faith has to do first of all. 
Over here are the material things with which we 
have grown a bit familiar. Here right about us 
science began its beautiful discoveries. But as 
progress advanced, the scientist moved farther down 
toward that as yet undiscovered line where the 
material and the spiritual border on to each other, 
and his latest and most startling discoveries have 
been made in the realm of the unseen, the intan- 
gible. He is dealing with the finer forces of nature 
rather than with her coarser material. The farther 
he goes, the more refined and the more nearly 
immaterial are the secrets which he uncovers for 
us. Some Sabbath morning he will awake and 
find himself face to face with a theologian who has 
come down from that other sphere, and who was 



LIFE AFTER DEATH 1 27 

brave enough to believe truth is safe wherever 
found, and who has come with open mind and hand 
to welcome the student of nature as his brother. 

Science proceeds on the declaration that nothing 
is ever lost. Around the universe lie impassable 
walls, over which none of its contents can fall into 
nothingness. Whether it be matter or force or 
spirit, once imprisoned in God's house, it is to be 
here filling its place forever and ever. That humble, 
obscure man who carries about within him the 
stunted and disfigured image of his Maker, is to 
enjoy or endure an endless life. Once here, science 
forbids his escape; grace makes it worth while for 
him to remain. 

To the Christian, the last part of the verse cited 
at the opening of this chapter brings its fullest com- 
fort. God is the heart's native home. No matter 
where in space and moral departure he wanders, 
there is going to be unrest until he reaches the place 
from which he started. You have looked into a 
toy-like box in which a needle is balanced on a pivot. 
You shook the box, you abused it with your vio- 
lence, you agitated it until it seemed to have lost 
balance. But when you held it quiet for a moment, 
it quivered, swayed back and forth, and then rested. 
It stretched itself out along the lines of celestial 
geography and turned its loyal face toward a spot 
in the heavens. No matter that the spot is blank to 
your dull eyes, the needle is subject to its own laws, 
and it cannot rest with its face in any other direction. 



128 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT 

You have seen a tempted and tried and sinful 
man driven by passion. He seemed to regard 
neither God nor man. Reckless disregard of all that 
is true and abiding marked his conduct. Then when 
an hour of reflection came and the deeper forces of 
his soul claimed their place, he turned a stained 
and penitent face toward God and rested in par- 
doning grace. Your telescope has no way of show- 
ing you the charmed spot the needle adores, any 
more than your natural eye can see the God of 
love ; but the trusting heart knows where to look. 

Coming back now to the written word, after our 
reverent and modest study of things material, we 
may be better prepared to understand these prom- 
ises which borrow force because of immortality. 
Maybe we can read the lines better for the outing in 
fresh air. Maybe we can know our Father better 
for having walked with him under his skies and for 
having admired the work of his hands. Certainly 
we ought to be seeking that preparation which will 
fit us for his use and presence when we are to go 
before him. His door stands wide open to our 
coming. 



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